7 militants killed as anger grows over Iraq insurgency

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Opposition to the insurgency apparently boiled over into bloodshed yesterday 25 miles south of Baghdad as the townsmen of Wihda attacked militants thought to be planning a raid on the town and killed seven, police Capt. Hamadi al-Zubeidy reported.

While it is impossible to precisely gauge public opinion, it is clear many Iraqis have grown tired of two years of insecurity, and some are directing their wrath at those behind the bombings and attacks.

Iraq's majority Shiite Arabs and ethnic Kurds have long criticized the largely Sunni Arab insurgency, portraying the militants as terrorists, loyalists of the Saddam Hussein regime and foreign fighters. But the insurgents are also being criticized publicly by prominent Sunnis, including opponents of the U.S. presence.

"The real resistance should only target the occupiers, and no normal person should consider dozens of dead people to be some kind of collateral damage while you are trying to kill somebody else," cleric Ahmed Abdul-Ghafur told worshippers yesterday at Um al-Qura, the main Sunni mosque in Baghdad. "Everybody should speak out against such inhumane acts."

The growing anger was underlined in Hillah, a predominantly Shiite Muslim city south of Baghdad where a suicide car bombing killed 125 people Monday — the deadliest single attack since Saddam's ouster.

The next day, more than 2,000 people chanting "No to terrorism!" demonstrated outside the clinic where the bomber drove into a crowd of Iraqi police and army recruits, setting off an explosion that also killed civilians. Anger against insurgents is being fed, in part, by a government television campaign. Last week, U.S.-financed Al-Iraqiya TV aired a series of reports showing men describing themselves as insurgents calmly talking about how they had beheaded dozens of people, kidnapped others for ransom, and raped women and girls before killing them.

"People are realizing that the captured insurgents are not superheroes. They are timid people who kill for money and they have nothing to do with jihad," said Karim Humadi, head of programming for Al-Iraqiya.

The anger over deaths caused by insurgents does not always translate into acceptance of U.S. troops, who are widely blamed for the chaos in Iraq.

"The Iraqi people are brave and won't accept any foreigner on their soil. They will fight the occupation troops until we force them to leave Iraq," said Haitham Abdul Razak, who was a captain in Saddam's army.