BAGHDAD, Iraq – A forbidden love affair that ended with a young woman’s death by stoning led to religiously motivated bloodshed Sunday when gunmen dragged members of a tiny religious minority off a bus and killed 23 of them, police and witnesses said.
Car bombings in the capital killed at least another 20 people.
The incident in the northern city of Mosul was shocking in its brutality and frightening for the specter it raised – violence between Muslims and non-Muslims aggravating the already volatile conflict involving Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds.
The victims were Yazidis, a sect that is a non-Islamic religion with its roots in the Middle East and whose followers have faced persecution from a succession of rulers.
Police in Mosul said the slayings of the Yazidis took place Sunday evening as a bus was carrying employees of a weaving factory home after work. Men in two sedans blocked the road on which the bus was traveling, then separated the Yazidis from other passengers before shooting them, said police Capt. Ibrahim Jaboori.
Police and residents of Bashiqa, home for many of the victims, linked the attack to the stoning death earlier in April of a Yazidi woman by fellow Yazidis angry over her conversion to Islam and love affair with a Sunni man. The stoning occurred in Bashiqa, they said, about 20 miles north of Mosul.
Ayad Arshad, 17, a student who was nearby, said people panicked and fled into their homes. After it was over, Arshad emerged from his house to see bodies strewn on the ground.
“Most of them were older people. Only two were about my age,” he said. “The scene was disgusting. It reminded me of what my father told me about the genocides that Saddam (Hussein) used to do.”
The killings struck terror among Yazidis, who shuttered their shops and braced for more attacks.
Also Sunday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in Egypt to drum up support among Arab leaders for his Shiite-led government, told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that Iraq was not embroiled in a civil or sectarian war. Key Arab leaders pressured him to step up reconciliation efforts to include Sunni insurgents if he expects Arab support.
Also Sunday, al-Maliki announced that he had ordered a halt to a barrier being built by the U.S. military that would separate a Sunni enclave from Shiite areas of Baghdad. The wall had drawn sharp criticism from residents and Sunni leaders who complained it would isolate the community.
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