Gunmen abduct 22 Shi'ite shepherds west of Baghdad

20 men with automatic rifles open fire on group as several thousand sheep graze; earlier, 6 power plant workers gunned down in n. Iraq.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
iraq shepherd 88 (photo credit: )
iraq shepherd 88
(photo credit: )
Heavily armed gunmen abducted 22 Shiite shepherds who were tending thousands of sheep and had wandered into a dangerous Sunni area west of Baghdad, while six power plant workers were gunned down in northern Iraq. The attacks on Wednesday reflected the spread of sectarian violence outside Baghdad as violence declines in the capital, where a US-Iraqi security crackdown is in its eighth week. The shepherds had traveled from the Shiite holy city of Karbala to a greener stretch of land in the vast area around Amariyah, some 40 kilometers west of Baghdad in the Sunni-dominated Anbar province, Karbala police spokesman Rahman Mishawi said. A shepherd who escaped the attack said about 20 men with automatic rifles drove up in vehicles and opened fire on the group as their several thousand sheep were grazing. "I suddenly realized that we must be near Amariyah and that Sunnis were attacking us," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. "Six of us were able to flee in our pickup but unfortunately they kidnapped 22 friends of mine and stole our sheep." Jassim al-Wandi, a relative of one of the kidnap victims, appealed for their release. "They are peaceful people and very easygoing. What was their sin that could justify stealing their animals on which their daily life depends?" he said. In all, at least 34 people were killed or found dead in Iraq on Wednesday, including the six Sunni Arab men killed in an ambush near the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk. The gunmen drove by in two cars and strafed a minibus in Manazlah as it was taking the men to work at a power station, local army commander Maj. Gen. Anwar Mohammed Amin said. Two of the six killed were engineers, he said. The attack came two days after a suicide truck bomber struck a police station in a Kurdish neighborhood in Kirkuk, killing 15 people, including a newborn girl and a US soldier. Nearly 200 people were wounded. Ethnic and religious tensions have been rising in Kirkuk after the government adopted a plan to relocate thousands of Arabs who were moved to the city 290 kilometers north of Baghdad decades ago in Saddam Hussein's campaign to displace the Kurds. Police reported finding the bodies of nine bullet-riddled torture victims in Baghdad, the second-lowest total since the security operation began Feb. 14. The decline in such sectarian killings has been attributed to orders by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr that has kept Shiite militias largely off the streets. US military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said al-Qaida in Iraq was trying to undo that deal and "ignite a cycle of tit-for-tat violence," but he expressed cautious optimism they would not succeed. "There are encouraging signs that more people are buying into restraint instead of retribution," he said. Caldwell said sectarian violence dropped 26 percent from February to March in Baghdad. But he was largely referring to execution-style killings and assassinations usually blamed on Shiite death squads and acknowledged the military remained "extremely concerned" about high-profile bomb attacks that have killed more than 300 people in the past eight days. Bloodshed has increased elsewhere in Iraq because insurgents and militiamen moved operations out of the capital in advance of the security crackdown. The Iraqi government said it was extending the security plan to other areas of the country in response to the spreading violence. It said the effort was launched Tuesday in the northern city of Mosul. "These efforts are now expanded beyond the limits of Baghdad to provide peace and security backed by economic and political measures," government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said, saying terrorists had taken hold of the area around Mosul and violent Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. Caldwell said three of the five additional US brigades to be deployed as part of the security plan were in Iraq, and he stressed that the US military maintained the flexibility to deploy the reinforcements outside the capital to help quell violence. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told US President George W. Bush in a recent videoconference that some Iraqi officials are involved in terrorism, government officials said Wednesday. The two leaders spoke Monday, a day after US officials in Baghdad reported two suicide vests had been found near a trash bin in the "Green Zone," the highly guarded area of central Baghdad where the US Embassy is located. "The prime minister told him this is what we expect. Some politicians are involved in terrorism," said one Iraqi official. The official's comments were confirmed by two other officials. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information. "Terrorists work in two ways, either as gunmen in the field or in politics," the official quoted al-Maliki as telling Bush. The Iraqi official said terrorists wanted the new security plan in the capital to fail "so they entered the Green Zone." Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for Bush's National Security Council, said Wednesday that Bush and al-Maliki "talked about the importance of fighting terrorists, but I don't recall the suicide belts coming up."