October On Pace to Be the Deadliest Month in Iraq War

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Muhanned Saif Aldin
The Washington Post

Sunday 15 October 2006

October on Pace to Be the Deadliest Month in Iraq War
Baghdad- Three U.S. soldiers were killed Saturday when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb, the U.S. military said in a statement Sunday. Their deaths raised the toll to 49 U.S. troops killed so far for the month, putting October on track to be one of the deadliest months in the war for American soldiers.

The three soldiers were killed at about 11 a.m. Saturday, local time, when their vehicle was struck by an improvised explosive device south of Baghdad, the military said. Their names were withheld pending notification of their families. The military did not release any other details of the incident.

The U.S. military earlier reported that a bomb killed an American soldier southwest of Baghdad on Friday and that a Marine died "due to enemy action" Saturday in the western province of Anbar.

American and Iraqi officials have attributed the rise in U.S. deaths to increased violence during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and aggressive U.S. military operations in Baghdad.

Also on Saturday, Shiite militiamen surged into a town north of Baghdad to launch attacks that by nightfall killed at least 27 Sunni Arabs, many of them brought to a hospital bearing the marks of electric drills and other signs of torture, according to medical workers, residents, police and militia leaders. The militiamen were seeking revenge for the killing of 17 Shiite farmworkers.

Sounds of shooting suggested the killing in the city of Balad continued into the night Saturday, as reinforcements from the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry arrived and residents cowered in their homes. "You hear nothing but gunshots," Hasanein Ali, assistant director of Balad's hospital, said by telephone.

In addition to the dead counted at the hospital, one Balad resident who fled the city said he had seen more bodies burned in the streets.

The fierce outbreak of violence in Balad, a mostly Shiite city surrounded by Sunni towns, was sparked in the mostly Sunni town of Duluiyah. The two communities are separated only by the Tigris River about 50 miles north of Baghdad.

On Friday, 17 Shiite laborers who had been hired to prune date palm trees in Duluiyah were kidnapped, police said. The workers' headless bodies were found outside the town later that day.
Shiite leaders in Balad said they responded to the farmworkers' killings by asking a Baghdad office of Moqtada al-Sadr, an influential Shiite cleric, to send militiamen and weapons.

"It is necessary to take a strong stand, so that such killings will not be repeated, and so we can take our revenge," said Taysser Musawi, a Shiite cleric in Balad.

Scores of militia fighters went to Balad in answer to the call, and residents said they targeted the city's Sunni minority.

"The armed men, using loudspeakers, ordered Sunnis to leave the city of Balad within 24 hours or they will face death," said Ali, the hospital official. "The city now is in the hands of the armed men and the militias."

Ali added that some police officers appeared to be fighting alongside the militiamen.

Ali said 27 dead Sunnis had been brought to the hospital, and said he believed more bodies had yet to be collected because of darkness and the fighting. A local Sunni resident, Muhannad Khalaf, interviewed outside Balad, said he had seen three burned bodies on the road as he fled north to safety in the Sunni city of Tikrit.

The attacks allegedly sparked fighting between townspeople of Duluiyah and Balad. In Balad, police Capt. Abdul Aziz Khazrajy said the Interior Ministry in Baghdad sent security forces to the scene.

Khalaf asserted that the Interior Ministry commandos had set up checkpoints and were screening travelers, seeking out Sunnis. Both Shiite and Sunni fighters in Iraq's growing sectarian violence often are accused of using traffic checks to find members of the opposite sect and kill them.

A police major in Duluiyah, Hussein Alwan, said by telephone that residents "are in a state of alert and top readiness. They are carrying arms, while mosques are calling on the people through loudspeakers to take up arms in defense of the town. They expect an imminent attack" by Interior Ministry commandos.

Tensions in the area have been high for weeks, "but yesterday's killing of the 17 farmworkers was the spark that will set off total war" there, Alwan said.

The fighting in the Tigris River towns served as a microcosm of the Shiite-Sunni killing that has increased dramatically this year and is claiming scores of lives in the capital and around Iraq every day, according to monthly counts from Iraqi authorities.

Baghdad police said they had found 23 bodies between midnight Friday and noon Saturday, all of the victims shot and most of them bearing signs of torture.

Three separate attacks involving bombs or mortars killed three civilians and a policeman in Baghdad, police said.

In the northern oil city of Kirkuk, gunmen attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint, triggering a clash that killed two gunmen, Lt. Col. Sadrudeen Aziz said.

Aldin reported from outside Balad. Other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report.

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