Violence Despite Baghdad Curfew
Gunmen kidnapped 24 workers from a refrigerated food factory and shot two others in western Baghdad on Sunday evening in what appeared to be a new sectarian attack, a security official said.
The kidnapped workers included Shiites and Sunnis, and among them were three women, Col. Abdul-Karim Khalaf told the Associated Press.
The attackers forced 26 workers into a refrigerator truck. But when two refused to get in the gunmen shot them, leaving them behind, seriously wounded as they sped off with the rest, said police Lt. Maithem Abdul Razzaq.
Khalaf said the identity of the kidnappers or their sect was not known. Similar mass kidnappings in the past have been blamed on either Sunni extremists or Shiite death squads, who sort the captives by their sect and kill their targets.
The workers were snatched from a factory that makes processed meat in the mainly Shiite neighborhood of Hayy al-Amil, in the western part of the capital, Khalaf said. The gunmen also took two refrigerator trucks, he said.
Thousands have been killed in recent months in tit-for-tat sectarian attacks between Shiites and Sunnis.
Also Sunday, the bodies of 21 people apparently killed in such attacks were found in Baghdad or to the south. Among them were seven bullet-riddled, handcuffed bodies in the southern Dora district of the capital, and six corpses — each with a single shot to the head — found in northern Baghdad.
In other developments:
The dispute threatened a sectarian crisis within the national unity government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which is struggling to contain spiralling Shiite-Sunni killings that the U.S. ambassador said have surpassed Sunni insurgent attacks in deadliness.
The potential government crisis erupted after U.S. troops on Friday arrested a bodyguard of Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi, saying the man was suspected of leading an al Qaeda-linked cell that was "in the final stages" of carrying out a string of bombings in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, the center of government.
Al-Dulaimi heads the Iraqi Accordance Front, the main Sunni Arab party with 44 seats in parliament and positions in al-Maliki's government, including a supporter in the Defense Minister post.
The government also includes Shiite parties linked to militias accused of killing Sunnis — and the arrest threatened to wreck al-Maliki's attempts to forge a Sunni-Shiite reconciliation that could rein in the militias as well as Sunni insurgent violence.
"We are faced with two choices, either militias or the nation. We will not allow the dignity of the nation to be violated," al-Maliki said Sunday in an interview with Al-Hurra TV.
After the bodyguard's arrest, an unprecedented surprise curfew was imposed on Baghdad on Saturday, preventing even pedestrians as well as vehicle traffic. The curfew was lifted early Sunday.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, sought to contain the political fallout, underlining in a joint statement that "the arrested individual had no ties to al-Dulaimi's family, nor is al-Dulaimi connected in any way to the suspect activities of the individual."
But Baha el-Deen al-Araji, a lawmaker from the party of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, accused Sunni politicians of having "direct and indirect links to Saddamists, Takfiris (Sunni radicals) and terrorists."
He demanded a "significant cabinet reshuffle" to change "ministries of security and public services dossiers."
"All our Sunni brothers have terrorist groups. This is destructive to the reconciliation process," another Sadrist lawmaker, Nasser al-Saadi, told the Associated Press. "We must stand up to them." He said that if al-Dulaimi is shown to have links to al Qaeda "he should be treated as a terrorist." The lawmakers said parliament would discuss the arrest in a session Monday.
Al-Dulaimi denied any connection to militants and said those trying to "defame" the Accodance Front should "be silent because any factor that leads to blow up this case would affect the entire national unity process."
A lawmaker from al-Dulaimi's party, Harith al-Obeidi, accused Shiites of trying to "defame the bloc because of our principled stances against the (Shiite) militias who are playing havoc throughout the country."
Thousands of people have died in recent months in Shiite-Sunni killings, and violence by Sunni insurgents has continued. The top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, said Wednesday that over the preceding week suicide attacks were at their highest level ever.
Khalilzad said al Qaeda-linked militants had been weakened in recent months and that "a main part of the violence now is sectarian violence ... between death squads associated with militias."
Speaking on CNN's "Late Edition," he said al-Maliki's government "in the course of the next two months, has to make progress in terms" but that he was optimistic that with the prime minister's reconciliation plan and U.S.-Iraqi security efforts "it is very plausible in my mind that next year the level of violence will be lower than this year."