Posted on 03/12/2008 9:34:02 PM PDT by Aussie Dasher
Suspected Al-Qaeda militants attacked a village in Diyala province north of Baghdad and beheaded five members of a local group fighting the jihadist network, police said.
Police Lieutenant Colonel Najim al-Sumaidaie said the militants raided the village of Benizad, south of the provincial capital Baquba, and attacked a newly created outpost of a local anti-Qaeda "Awakening" group.
"Five people from the Sahwa (Awakening) group were shot dead and later beheaded by the militants," Sumaidaie said, referring to groups of mostly Sunni Arabs who have allied with the US military to fight Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
"We set up the outpost with the help of Iraqi army soldiers who later left us to man the post. However, this afternoon we were attacked," he said from his bed in a hospital in Baquba where he is being treated for his wounds.
"Five of our number were killed after we ran short of ammunition. Another 10 of us escaped. We later alerted the army, who went to the village and found that the five men who were shot dead had been beheaded. Their bodies were mutilated."
Diyala is one of the most dangerous regions of Iraq where US and Iraqi troops are fighting Al-Qaeda militants.
The Awakening groups began in western Anbar province where Sunni tribal leaders in September 2006 turned on their former Al-Qaeda allies and put them to flight.
Since then, they have sprung up across the country, supported and paid for by the US military, which sees them as essential to help hold areas cleared by an American "surge" of some 30,000 troops.
US commanders say there are now around 130 such groups across Iraq with a total of about 80,000 volunteers, 80 percent of them Sunni and the remainder Shiite.
Members of the groups have been the target of attack by various insurgent groups, including Al-Qaeda.
See the bad guys don't use waterboarding. They just cut your head off. What's wrong with the liberals? Don't they understand anything?
Kumbia Lord, Kumbia, Kumbia Lord, Kumbia, Kumbial Lord, Kumbia, Oh Lord Kumbia.
The next stop on the Coalition extermination tour. What I can’t see is why they do not surround these towns with troops before they go in and clear them out. This way none will escape to behead anyone else. They did it in Fallujah and it worked.
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