• In Dawr, a town in north-central Iraq, three vehicles pulled up to the local police station and 30 men swarmed out; they bound the officers inside and carried away every weapon in the station.
Two attacks on security forces were reported after the roadside massacre. An explosives-laden flashlight was tossed at a National Guard checkpoint near Baqubah, wounding three. Three guardsmen and a civilian driver were injured when a roadside bomb went off beside the vehicle in which they were riding to work, the Associated Press reported.
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)
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Iraqis reacted to the massacre with expressions of sympathy for the recruits and a variety of possible explanations.
"Those people are serving their country, why are they killed?" said Salman Mohammed, 42, as he waited for a friend in a Baghdad restaurant where they planned to break their Ramadan fast at sunset. "I think that there are foreign countries that want to destroy these forces. I think the Zionists are behind that. They want to make this country collapse . . . to extend their state from the Nile to the Euphrates."
Sabah Hussein, a baker, noted that many people had come away from encounters with guardsmen feeling abused.
"Of course I am against what happened," said Hussein, 51. "It is terrible. But sometimes I think they don't behave well with the people. A few days ago, they came and raided the nearby husseiniya," he said, referring to a Shiite mosque. "They were really impolite with the people. So maybe there are some people who lost their son, friend, brother or any relative because of them, so they ambushed and killed them.
"Or maybe there are some gangs who were paid to kill them for the sake of some other side which we don't know."
Another Baghdad resident said both sides in the encounter -- insurgents and guard recruits -- were probably interested only in a paycheck.
"There are no jobs, and that is why many young men joined these groups," said Ali Saber, 22, a student in the college of arts at Baghdad University. "Not for the sake of jihad or resistance, but to gain money. And the same is with the National Guardsmen. Most of them, if not all, joined the army for the sake of money."
That reality -- widely acknowledged across Iraq -- has apparently played a role in many attacks. A mortar attack on a National Guard base north of Baghdad last week occurred as 550 guardsmen had gathered in formation.
The deputy governor of Diyala province, Aqil Hamid Adili, said the insurgents clearly had help planning Saturday's mass execution.
"There was probably collusion among the soldiers or other groups," he told the satellite news channel al-Arabiya. "Otherwise, the gunmen would not have gotten the information about the soldiers' departure from their training camp and that they were unarmed."
The State Department said that Seitz, the slain diplomatic security special agent, was killed around 5 a.m. when indirect fire hit Camp Victory, the sprawling U.S. base beside the Baghdad International Airport.
"The Department of State and I mourn the loss of one of our own today in Baghdad," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said during a tour of Asia. "Ed was a brave American, dedicated to his country and to a brighter future for the people of Iraq."
