Gunmen execute 23; bombs kill 20 in Baghdad

updated 5:20 p.m. ET April 22, 2007

BAGHDAD - Gunmen in northern Iraq stopped a bus filled with Christians and members of a tiny Kurdish religious sect, police said, separating out the groups and taking 23 of the passengers away to be shot.

The attack came on a violent day in Baghdad, with at least 20 people killed in car bombings, most in a double suicide strike against a police station in a religiously mixed neighborhood.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, on a tour abroad to ask the mostly Sunni-led governments of the Arab world to help his struggling government stop the violence in Iraq, said he told Egypt’s president that Iraq’s reality is “not a civil or sectarian war.”

Police said the execution-style killings of the Yazidis—a primarily Kurdish sect that worships an angel figure considered to be the devil by some Muslims and Christians—appeared to be in response to the stoning death of a Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam.

In the northern Iraq killings, armed men in several cars stopped the bus as it was carrying workers from the Mosul Textile Factory to their hometown of Bashika, which has a mixed population of Christians and Yazidis—a primarily Kurdish sect that worships an angel figure considered to be the devil by some Muslims and Christians.

The gunmen checked passengers’ identification, then asked the Christians to get off the bus, said police Brig. Mohammed al-Wagga.

With the Yazidis still inside, the gunmen drove them to eastern Mosul, where they were lined up along a wall and shot to death, al-Wagga said.

Muslims fear reprisals
After the killings, hundreds of Yazidis took to the streets of Bashika, a town in Ninevah province that is 80 percent Yazidi, 15 percent Christian and about five percent Muslim. Shops were shuttered and many Muslims closed themselves in their homes, fearing reprisal attacks.

Abdul-Karim Khalaf, a police spokesman for Ninevah province said the executions were in response to the killing two weeks ago of a Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam.

The woman fell in love with a Muslim, converted to Islam and ran off with him, Khalaf said. Disapproving relatives dragged her back to Bashika, where she was stoned to death, he said. A grainy video showing gruesome scenes of the stoning was distributed on Iraqi Web sites in recent weeks.

‘Is this fair?’
In a religiously mixed neighborhood of Baghdad, two suicide car bombers attacked a police station, police said, killing at least 13 people and turning nearby buildings into piles of rubble.

The first driver raced through a police checkpoint guarding the station and exploded his vehicle just outside the two-story building, police said. Moments later, a second suicide car bomber aimed at the checkpoint’s concrete barriers and exploded just outside them, police said.

The blasts collapsed nearby buildings, smashing windows and burying at least four cars under piles of concrete. Metal roofs were peeled back by the force of the explosions. Pools of blood made red mud of a dusty driveway.

A man who was among the 82 wounded in Sunday’s attack staggered through the wreckage.

“All our belongings and money were smashed and are gone. What kind of life is this? Where is the government?” he asked. “There are no jobs, and things are very bad. Is this fair?”

Iraqi police stations often are the target of attacks by insurgents who accuse the officers of betraying Iraq by working in cooperation with its U.S.-backed Shiite government and the American military.

MORE FROM CONFLICT IN IRAQ

Conflict in Iraq Section Front

Iraq imposes new limits on U.S. forces 3 coalition soldiers die in Iraq attack Cookbook captures Iraqi culinary heritage Army units to go to Iraq for changing mission Conflict in Iraq Section Front   Add Conflict in Iraq headlines to your news reader: