BAGHDAD, Oct. 24 -- The bodies of 49 freshly trained Iraqi National Guard recruits, lined up and executed by insurgents, were discovered on a roadside about 75 miles northeast of Baghdad, Iraqi officials said Sunday.
In a separate attack, a member of the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security was killed when a rocket or mortar round landed in a U.S. military base adjoining the Baghdad airport early Sunday morning. Edward J. Seitz, 41, was the assistant regional security officer for the U.S. Embassy.
Members of the Iraqi National Guard stand over the bodies of fellow guardsmen, found on a roadside north of Baghdad. The recent recruits apparently were killed by insurgents who ambushed the buses taking them from their training base to begin a three-day leave.
(AP)
|
|
The massacre of the recruits occurred shortly after sunset Saturday near the army's main training base in Kirkush, said Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman, a spokesman for the interim Interior Ministry. The recruits had just departed the base aboard three buses to begin a 20-day leave when they were stopped at a checkpoint manned by insurgents dressed as Iraqi police, residents said, according to Abdul-Rahman.
Most of the recruits appeared to have filed off the buses, lined up in four rows and lain down before they were shot. The first 37 bodies were discovered Saturday night. Another 12 were found after daybreak Sunday a short distance away, still inside the minibus where they were killed. Three drivers were among those killed.
"All of them were from the southern provinces," Abdul-Rahman said of the victims. "Most of them had their hands tied behind their back."
No security vehicles accompanied the minibuses, which were unmarked. The guardsmen were dressed in civilian clothes and were unarmed because they were going on leave, the spokesman said. Their bodies were transported to the nearby town of Mandali, a town on a road that hugs the Iranian border leading south and east from Kirkush.
A group led by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant linked to al Qaeda, asserted responsibility for the attack on the guardsmen, whom it called "apostates," according to a statement posted on the Internet.
The attack was unusual for its boldness if not for its target. The men and women who staff Iraq's nascent security forces -- and whom U.S. officials are counting on to take on a greater role from U.S.-led military forces -- have been killed by the hundreds over the last year, in attacks that appear to be increasing in audacity and frequency.
In the hours before the recruits were killed, at least six other attacks on Iraqi security forces were officially recorded:
• An Iraqi police officer was found dead in a field in Baghdad.
• Another police officer was killed when shots were fired into his patrol car as it made a U-turn on a street in the capital.
• The operations chief of the police department in the Kurdish city of Irbil in northern Iraq was assassinated by a pistol shot.
• A car bomb exploded at an Iraqi National Guard checkpoint in Balad, northwest of Baghdad.
• A roadside bomb exploded beside a police patrol in the southern city of Basra.
