Bomb Blasts Kill Police as PM Begins Tour to Garner Arab Support for Iraqi Government  

By Michael Ireland
Chief Correspondent, ASSIST News Service

BAGHDAD / MOSUL, IRAQ (ANS) – Gunmen in northern Iraq stopped a bus filled with Christians and members of a tiny Kurdish religious sect, separating out the groups and taking 23 of the passengers away to be shot, news sources including the Associated Press (AP), Reuters, and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) report.

Gunmen in northern Iraq stopped a bus filled with Christians and members of a tiny Kurdish religious sect, separating out the groups and taking 23 of the passengers away to be shot, news sources including the Associated Press (AP), Reuters, and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) report.The executions came on the same day that two suicide car bombers targeted a police station in western Baghdad, killing 13. At least 82 people were wounded in bomb blasts. Forty-six of those injured were police officers as the detonated bombs, moments apart, collapsed buildings in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nuri 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.”

News sources say armed men in several cars stopped the commuter bus Sunday afternoon 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 considered to be the devil by some Muslims and Christians.

The AP said the gunmen checked passengers’ identification cards, then asked all 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.

Yazidis are concentrated mostly around the northern city of Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.

After the killings, hundreds of Yazidis took to the streets of Bashika. Shops were shuttered and many Muslim residents closed themselves in their homes, fearing reprisal attacks. Police set up additional checkpoints across the city, according to the AP report.

A BBC report confirmed that all the victims were said to be members of the Yazidi religious minority which follows a pre-Islamic religion and worships an angel figure that some Muslims and Christians consider the devil.

Police say the Yazidis were workers at a textile factory in Mosul. Their bus was ambushed as they were traveling home to the nearby town of Bashika.

Police reports said the gunmen ordered followers of other faiths to leave the bus, before killing the Yazidi members in a field by the road. Three Yazidi members were seriously wounded but survived the attack, police and hospital officials told Reuters.

No group has so far claimed the responsibility for the shootings, but reports say the Yazidi community has recently faced threats from Sunni Muslim extremists in the Mosul area.

The Reuters news agency said gunmen shot dead the 23 factory workers from an ancient minority sect in an apparent revenge killing in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Sunday, according to police and hospital sources.

Brigadier-General Mohammed al-Waggaa said the gunmen stopped the vehicle, forced the textile factory workers out of a minibus and gunned them down in the eastern al-Nour district of Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq’s third-largest city.

A source at a local hospital said 23 people were killed and three were seriously wounded.

Waggaa said the execution-style killing appeared to be in retaliation for an incident in which a Yazidi woman was stoned to death several weeks ago for converting to Islam. He said the workers were found near a mosque in the same area.

Another police source who declined to be named confirmed the incident and said the woman had fallen in love with a Muslim man and ran away with him a few months ago, Reuters reported.

Police then detained the couple, kept the man in jail and freed the woman after receiving assurances from her family she would not be harmed.

According to the source, members of the Yazidi community decided they had to “cleanse the shame,” and stoned the woman to death.

One witness said he saw a mobile phone video of the stoning. The video, which was a few minutes long, showed a group of men beating, kicking and hitting a woman with large blocks of cement.

Yazidis are members of a pre-Islamic Kurdish sect and live in northern Iraq and Syria. Yazidis in Iraq say they have often faced discrimination because the chief angel they venerate as a manifestation of God is often identified as the fallen angel Satan in biblical terminology.

Yazidis, who say they suffered massacres during the secular rule of Saddam Hussein, also believe God created good and evil in the world.