Iraq: MP assassinated, dozens of bodies found
Insurgents assassinated a Kurdish member of parliament and police found 20 bodies shot to death and dumped in the Tigris River 50 miles north of the capital, where there was no major violence for the first time in five days.
Faris Nasir Hussein, a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, was killed yesterday along with his brother and their driver in an ambush 50 miles north of Baghdad. A second Kurdish lawmaker, Haidar Shanoun, was wounded in the attack near the town of Dujail.
Police and PUK officials said the men were murdered on Saturday night as they drove to the capital for yesterday’s session of the legislature, which signed off on minor amendments to the country’s draft constitution and delivered it to the United Nations for printing. The UN will distribute five million copies in advance of the October 15 referendum.
“The terrorists have launched a war of aggression against all Iraqis (but) we are up to it,” said Deputy Speaker Hussain al-Shahristani.
Authorities reported finding two dozen more bodies yesterday, men shot to death in the apparent ongoing tit-for-tat killings between Sunni and Shiite death squads.
Four of the dead were found handcuffed and shot in east Baghdad. Twenty more were dragged from the Tigris River near Balad, a city 50 miles north of the capital, police reported.
The US military said a soldier was killed in a roadside bombing while on patrol near Al Asad Air Base in a violent insurgent-infested region near the Syrian border. The dead soldier was assigned to the 56th Brigade Combat Team.
The death raised to at least 1,899 members of the US military who have been died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003.
Britain, which has about 9,000 forces in the Basra region of southern Iraq, will keep its troops in the country as long as they are required and could send more, British Defence Secretary John Reid said yesterday.
In Basra, Iraq’s second-largest, 200 militiamen with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades set fire to tires as they barricaded main streets, demanding the provincial governor order the immediate release of Sheikh Ahmed Fartosi.
The Sheikh, a senior figure among followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia, was arrested by British and Iraqi forces on Friday. He was accused of launching raids against security forces in the city, police said.
A Coalition military statement yesterday said Fartosi and two other detained militant were “suspects in terror attacks against Coalition forces, resulting in the deaths of nine members of coalition forces in the past two months in Basra.”
After a tense stand-off lasting several hours, the militiamen withdrew when an al-Sadr representative arrived from Najaf to negotiate with police and British forces who control the region.
Sheikh Mudhafar al-Shawki emerged from the meeting last night and ordered the militiamen stay off the streets until he could report to al-Sadr. Neither side would give details of the talks.
