IRAQ: Al-Qaeda militants kill at least eight members of a neighbourhood police patrol

Al-Qaeda militants kill at least eight members of a neighbourhood police patrol in southern Baghdad after shooting two Iraqi soldiers and stealing their vehicle. Al Qaeda militants killed at least eight members of a neighbourhood police patrol in southern Baghdad on Thursday (November 22) after taking them by surprise by driving up in a stolen Iraqi army vehicle, police said. The al Qaeda fighters had commandeered the vehicle from two Iraqi soldiers whom they shot. They opened fire on the police patrol in the Hawr Rajab area of southern Baghdad's Doura district, a mainly Sunni Arab area and al Qaeda stronghold, after approaching in at least one of two vehicles they had stolen. An Interior Ministry official confirmed that eight "Awakening Council" members had been killed. He said three Iraqi soldiers were killed and another three were wounded, and that two al Qaeda gunmen had also been killed. Mainly Sunni Arab tribal sheikhs have been organising young men into local police units, known as concerned local citizens, to drive out Sunni Islamist al Qaeda. These have been partly credited for falling levels of violence in Iraq. "Members of the awakening (council) informed us that they had been attacked by the terrorists from the al-Qaeda organisation in the Arab Jubour area. We have nine martyrs who were innocent civilians and four others wounded in al-Yarmouk hospital," said one unidentified policeman. Police at Baghdad's Yarmouk hospital said two Iraqi army "humvee" vehicles had been seized at the start of the attack and police at the Hawr Rajab checkpoint did not challenge the occupants because they took them for soldiers. The bodies of the eight neighbourhood police and two soldiers were taken to the Yarmouk hospital in western Baghdad, Iraqi police said. Another four members of the patrol were wounded. Reuters Television footage showed several coffins loaded onto the back of a police truck to be taken to hospital. Another was tied to the top of a dilapidated car. A young woman and two toddlers, one of them crying, sat on the ground next to one simple wooden coffin. The neighbourhood police patrols, backed by the U.S. military as part of a counter-insurgency strategy, have been spreading through other areas after they were pioneered last year in western Anbar, once the most dangerous province in Iraq. Attacks on neighbourhood police units are not uncommon but Thursday's bold assault was one of the largest of its kind in Baghdad.

ITN Source | November 23, 2007

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