Interfaith love fuels hate, sparks massacre

BAGHDAD — The bad blood began to rise a few months ago in northern Iraq with the kind of interfaith love so reviled by Iraq's religious extremists: A Muslim woman eloped with a member of a tiny religious sect called Yazidi.

It erupted in a massacre Sunday, police said, when Sunni gunmen in Mosul hijacked a busload of mostly Yazidi workers from a nearby town and shot and killed 23 of them, one by one.

The mass murder was the latest attack on religious minorities in Iraq, where human-rights groups say Christians, Jews and members of other smaller sects are often killed, persecuted or forced to convert by Muslim extremists.

Last month in Kirkuk, two elderly Chaldean Catholic nuns were killed by armed men who stormed into their house as they slept.

But police said Sunday that the Mosul killings appeared to be rooted not just in religious differences but also in revenge.

Four months ago, the Muslim woman eloped with the Yazidi man, who was from Shikhan, a Yazidi-majority village outside Mosul, said Mohammed Abdul Aziz al-Jabouri, the city's deputy police chief in Mosul. Muslims responded by torching some Yazidi homes in Shikhan, he said.

A few days ago, a Yazidi woman from Beshiqa, another nearby village populated mostly by Yazidis, eloped with a Muslim man and converted to Islam. To punish her, al-Jabouri said, the woman's family stoned her to death.

Sunday afternoon, workers from a Mosul textile factory were heading home to Beshiqa when gunmen stopped their bus, police said. After checking passengers' identifications, the gunmen drove to an isolated Mosul suburb, then lined up 23 of the workers and shot them to death, said Abdul Karim Khalaf al-Kinani, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry.

It was unclear how many people were on the bus. Gasan Salem Alias, 30, leader of the Yazidi Association for Solidarity and Brotherhood in Beshiqa, said the killings had sent a wave of shock and grief through the village, where some residents lost as many as three relatives. Burials were scheduled for this morning, he said.

The bloodshed came as violence continued in Baghdad, where two suicide car bombs exploded within moments of each other in Baiyaa, a mixed Sunni-Shiite area in the western part of the capital. Police said 13 people died — five policemen and eight civilians. The wounded included 46 policemen and 36 civilians.

Elsewhere in Baghdad, a parked car bomb exploded in the Sadiyah neighborhood, killing seven civilians and wounding 42, police said. A roadside bomb then struck a police patrol coming to check on the blast, killing one officer and wounding two others.

In all, at least 72 people were killed or found dead in Iraq on Sunday, including 24 bullet-riddled bodies and two brothers who were shot to death in the volatile city of Fallujah, a day after the chairman of the city's council was assassinated.

The U.S. military also reported the deaths of three soldiers. Two were killed in attacks in Baghdad on Saturday, while the third died from an unidentified non-combat cause that was still under investigation, the military said.

Iraqi president orders halt to wall construction

CAIRO, Egypt — Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Sunday that he had ordered a halt to the construction of a barrier that would separate a Sunni enclave from surrounding Shiite areas in Baghdad.

The U.S. military announced last week it was building a large concrete wall in the northern Azamiyah section of Baghdad in an effort to protect the minority Sunnis from attacks by Shiites living nearby.

The decision drew sharp criticism from residents and Sunni leaders who complained it would isolate their community.

In his first public comments on the issue, al-Maliki said he had ordered the construction to stop.

"There are other methods to protect neighborhoods." al-Maliki told reporters during a joint news conference with the secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, in Cairo, Egypt.

He did not elaborate but added "this wall reminds us of other walls," in an apparent reference to the wall that divided the German city of Berlin during the Cold War.

The Associated Press