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Over 40 Shiites said kidnapped in Iraq
By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer,
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - More than 40 Shiites were
abducted along a notoriously dangerous highway
just north of Baghdad, police said Wednesday,
and the death toll from a suicide bombing at a
wedding party rose to 23, including nine
children.
At least eight other people were either found
dead or slain in new attacks Wednesday,
including one person killed in a car bomb attack
in Baghdad's central market, which wounded five
others, police Lt. Ali Hassan said. The death
toll in the market attack was likely to rise, he
said.
The abductions Tuesday near the town of Tarmiyah
were another outbreak of sectarian violence in a
region where scores were killed last month in
reprisal killings among formerly friendly Shiite
and Sunni neighbors in the city of Balad.
Unarmed men checked identification cards and
seemed to be looking for familiar faces among
travelers stopped in heavy traffic, said an
eyewitness, who asked to be identified only by
the pseudonym Abu Omar for fear of reprisals.
Armed gunmen stood nearby during the abductions,
just out of sight of U.S. soldiers who were
disarming a roadside bomb nearby, Abu Omar said.
He and other Sunni travelers were allowed to
travel onward after showing their ID cards, he
said.
At least 40 travelers were missing and feared
abducted, said an officer at the Joint
Cooperation Center in the city of Tikrit, 80
miles north of Baghdad, who spoke on condition
of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Qassim al-Suwaidi, a doctor at Al-Sadr Hospital,
said, meanwhile, that 12 victims of Tuesday's
attack on a Shiite wedding in Baghdad had died
from their injuries. Eleven were killed on the
spot, he said. Another 19 were still being
treated at the hospital.
The attack, in which a bomber drove an
explosives-rigged car into a crowd outside the
bride's home, resembled recent killings aimed at
sparking Shiite retaliation and pushing Iraq
toward all-out civil war — a stated goal of the
al-Qaida in Iraq extremist group.
Police said U.S. and Iraqi forces on Tuesday
night stormed an office in the southwestern
hamlet of Ahrar belonging to the al-Sadr
organization, sponsors of the feared Mahdi Army
militia linked to sectarian murders and other
violence.
The troops, using U.S. air cover, and arrested
five followers of anti-American cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr, said Lt. Mohammed al-Shammari of the
provincial police. There were no reports of
casualties. The U.S. military had no immediate
comment on the report.
U.S. demands for a crackdown on the militia have
been a sticking point in relations with Iraqi
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose coalition
government is heavily dependent on al-Sadr's
political support.
On Tuesday, U.S. forces dismantled road blocks
around the Mahdi Army's Baghdad stronghold, the
Sadr City neighborhood, following an order from
the prime minister that was the latest in a
series of challenges to the U.S. designed to
test Washington's readiness to give him a
greater say in securing the world's most violent
capital.
Aides to the prime minister say he hopes to
expand his authority by exploiting the pressure
on President Bush over rising voter
dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war and
the rising U.S. death toll.
Iraq has moved toward repairing a 24-year breach
in formal diplomatic relations with neighboring
Syria. The Syrian foreign minister is
considering a visit to Baghdad this month, a
Syrian official said, in what would be the first
trip by a top Syrian figure since Saddam
Hussein's fall in 2003.
Al-Maliki's government also reported progress
expanding diplomatic ties, with eight countries
agreeing to open Iraqi embassies in their
capitals, according to a Foreign Ministry
statement.
Commitments have been received from South Korea,
Ukraine, Denmark, Slovakia, Serbia, the
Philippines, Sri Lanka and Nigeria, the
statement said.
Insurgents and Shiite militia groups continued
attacks on U.S. forces and Iraqis who work with
them.
An Iraqi translator with U.S. forces, Haidar
Muhsin, was shot dead late Tuesday in front of
his home in Diwaniyah, the second translator
killed in the southern city in recent days. An
Iraqi-American linguist with the U.S. army was
abducted in Baghdad last week and remains
missing.
In fresh attacks Wednesday, unknown gunmen
riding in a private car shot dead police officer
Izzaddin Abbas in central Baghdad as he rode his
motorcycle home, police Lt. Bilal Ali Majeed
said. A clerk with the Ministry of Industry was
shot and killed in northeastern Baghdad as he
was driving to work, police Lt. Thayer Mahmoud
said.
A police officer was among three people shot
dead in the northern city of Mosul, said Brig.
Sa'eed Ahmed of the provincial Police
Information Office. Mosul police also discovered
the charred body of an apparent murder victim,
Ahmed said.
The bodies of three people who were shot after
being blindfolded and bound at the wrists were
found dumped in the capital's eastern districts,
Capt. Mohammed Abdul Ghani, of the city's Rashad
Police Station said. Scores of such bodies have
been found in recent months, most believed to
have been abducted and tortured by sectarian
death squads.
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