BAGHDAD — The killers came at night, speaking passable English and wearing uniforms and carrying weapons that resembled those of the American military. By the time they left the village of Hawr Rajab on Friday evening, they had fatally shot or slit the throats of 25 members of an extended family, Iraqi officials said Saturday, in a chilling episode of violence reminiscent of the worst days of the country’s sectarian warfare in 2006 and 2007.
Most of the 19 male victims were members of Iraqi security forces or of Awakening Councils, groups that now partner with American forces and are employed by the Iraqi government to protect Sunni neighborhoods, but whose members had once been allied with Sunni extremist groups like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia during fighting against American troops.
Members of Awakening Councils are often branded by Al Qaeda as traitors, but their families have typically not been attacked. The Iraqi authorities said 25 people had been arrested as part of the investigation into the killings, including some who lived near the families.
Hawr Rajab, located just south of Baghdad, was a heavily contested site between Al Qaeda and American and Awakening forces but has been calmer in recent years.
At Mahmudiya Hospital, 25 coffins arrived on a truck Saturday morning for the victims, who ranged in age from teenagers to men in their 70s.
Family members, men standing separate from women, waited outside the hospital, stunned by what had happened.
Luyai Khadum said he had lost his father and four brothers.
“They were all killed,” he said. “I lost five family members. We are a Dulaimi family, so why would they do this to us?”
Often, a mention of the family’s influential tribe, the Dulaimi, is enough to protect them. This time it was no help.
Capt. Jay Ostrich, a spokesman for the United States military in Iraq, expressed condolences to the victims’ families and said American forces were prepared to aid in the investigation if the Iraqi government asked.
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While abu fiddles, Iraq returns to what it was before we ever got there. Silence from the US on this uptick in sectarian violence in Iraq has been deafening. The waste of all the lives we lost, and the human cost to all the Wounded Warriors who lived through trying to bring freedom to a perpetually unfree muslim nation by their OWN choice, is a sin more vast than any I can imagine.
It has always been my contention that ANY nation state who chooses islam as their governing doctrine, has chosen slavery of its own accord and there was NEVER, and never WILL be, any way to "give" them freedom.
The cost of this lesson will haunt the American conscience for generations...if we do not learn from this mistake.
There is no freedom in islam. No one outside islam can mandate it, nor offer it. It is an impossible task...one that is even now being repeated in Afghanistan.
Pray for our troops. Our government has no soul nor conscience. NO ONE is speaking up or speaking out.
islam is an atrocity. It is the absolute desecration of humanity. It is the very essence of the purist of evils on earth, and WE are being led into it with nary a wimper.
May GOD have mercy on us all.
Amen MM!
You are right: May God have mercy on all of us!