IRAQ: Two families gunned down as tit-for-tat sectarian attacks escalate across Iraq

Gunmen attacked a Sunni family in a town north of Baghdad on Monday (December 11), killing three, including a three year old girl, police said. Four other people were also injured in the attack. Officers said the family were driving through the volatile town of Baquba when the attack took place. Meanwhile, gunmen stormed the home of a Shi'ite family in a village near Tuz Khurmato, 70 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, killing six family-members, police said. The violence comes just a day after gunmen stormed the homes of two Shi'ite families in a predominantly Sunni Arab district of Baghdad on Sunday, killing nine people, according to police. Officers said about twenty gunmen had killed a father and three sons of one family and five brothers of another. No women were hurt in the attack in the southwestern Jihad district. On Saturday (December 9), Shi'ite militiamen raided the religiously mixed Hurriya district in western Baghdad, killing two people and forcing dozens of Sunni families to flee, police and witnesses said. Locals said around a hundred and fifty families forced from their homes had taken refuge in a school. On Monday (December 11), Iraqi Red Crescent officials distributed aid to the homeless, including kerosene heaters, blankets and water containers. "We are about to erect camps for those families because their numbers are growing every day," said Wafa Mahmoud of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society. In central Baghdad, a roadside bomb targeting civilians exploded, wounding an Iraqi soldier, police said. The attack took place in the wholesale market of al-Shurja in central Baghdad. Earlier in Baghdad, two bombs have exploded in Baghdad, the first attack was caused by a blast of a roadside bomb in eastern Baghdad while the second attack was caused by a car bomb in which one person was killed and four others were wounded. Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms ambushed a security vehicle transporting money to the Central Bank in Baghdad and made away with $1 million in cash on Monday, police and Interior Ministry sources said. Four private security guards were kidnapped in the daylight robbery in busy Sadoun Street in central Baghdad in an attack that highlighted the lawlessness gripping the capital. A mortar attack in Doura, south Baghdad, killed two and wounded six people, witnesses said. Local people said the victims were all eating lunch in a restaurant when three mortars hit the building. In July, militiamen rampaged through Jihad, shooting at least forty-two people. Many of the victims were killed after being pulled from their cars at fake police checkpoints. U.S. officials have warned that attacks by al Qaeda militants and reprisals by Shi'ite militias have sparked a vicious cycle of revenge killings that threaten to destroy Iraq. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has joined some commentators in describing the conflict as a civil war. The country has been gripped by rampant violence, which the United Nations estimates kill as many as 120 people a day, since the bombing of an important Shi'ite shrine in February.

ITN Source | December 11, 2006

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