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Civil war killings shoot up in Iraq
Murders and kidnappings in Iraq continue.
BY OUR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
October 31, 2006
Iraq’s woes are far from over. In a series of incidents on Tuesday, gunmen hijacked 12 minibuses and kidnapped as many as 40 passengers outside Baghdad, while a bomb ripped through a car leaving 15 people dead at a wedding party.
Buses traveling off the main road, past a US checkpoint was stopped by guerillas at Tarmiya. Passengers were kidnapped by the gunmen and are feared to be facing death. It may be recalled that recently almost 100 people were killed just before American troops moved in. The Sunni militants had then vowed to avenge the dead.
Meanwhile, as a many as 15 people were killed in Baghdad when a car bomb exploded as the groom’s family pulled headed for a wedding party in Ur district. The dead included four children. Seven people were injured in the mishap. The groom survived.
Reports from Baghdad said that a terrorist left a car parked on the street corner and set off a bomb. The spot of the attack was close to the Shia area of Sadr City, where 33 people had died just hours before this incident in another car bomb attack.
The renewed civil war has been raging and the blame is on Sunni extremists trying to make the battle worse by attacking the stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the powerful militia of the Shia cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al Sadr. Al Sadr had won a political victory when Nouri al-Shia prime minister Maliki ordered the Americans and Iraqis to lift their blockade of Sadr City. The Mahdi Army had threatened unspecified retaliatory action if the blockade was not lifted, as well as a city-wide strike, if the week-long stranglehold of checkpoints and car searches was not lifted.
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