At least 35 people were killed across Iraq on Monday, including four members of a family shot dead by gunmen as they attempted to flee their homes north of Baghdad. After receiving repeated threats in their home in the restive provincial capital of Baquba, the family packed their belongings in a pickup truck and fled, only to be stopped on the road by gunmen who riddled their car with bullets, killing four and wounding five. Gunmen also killed two other Shiites busy packing up their belongings in a small town just to the west of Baquba, while 10 other people, three of them soldiers, were killed elsewhere in Diyala, a province where sectarian violence is equalled only by that in Baghdad itself.The violence came even as the Iraqi government gave an optimistic assessment of the impact of a massive security operation in the capital and the return of displaced families to newly pacified neighborhoods. “We have statistics from the army unit in Ghazaliyah that some families have come back to their neighbourhoods,” said Iraqi military spokesman Brig Qassem al-Mussawi, referring to a largely Sunni Arab neighborhood of the capital.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi and US security personnel have been deployed on the streets of Baghdad since June in a bid to stem out tit-for-tat sectarian violence between the ousted Sunni Arab elite and the newly empowered Shiite majority that has been daily costing dozens of lives. In the past week, however, the violence has spiked with dozens of bodies turning up everyday, including 14 in the heart of the capital alone on Monday. “These numbers announced by the media are not accurate,” retorted government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh when asked about the worsening death toll.
The predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Fadhel in east Baghdad appears to be the latest battleground with the sounds of explosions resounding from the area on a nightly basis. Residents report repeated assaults by armed outsiders, using mortars and rocket propelled grenades as well as small arms.
The military spokesman played down the neighborhood’s problems, however, insisting that army patrols met little resistance in the district and found few illegal weapons in their searches. “Now, there are forces present in the area and the security situation is stable,” Mussawi said.
The government spokesman said the authorities were working hard to tackle the militias operating out of Shiite areas of east Baghdad that are blamed for many of the reprisals for Sunni insurgent assaults on their co-religionists. “The government is working hard to dissolve and integrate the militias through the political accord that exists in the country,” Dabbagh said. In other incidents, four policemen were killed by gunmen in the far north of Iraq not far from the Syrian border, while four women were killed in a series of shootings in the main northern city of Mosul.