By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 28, 2006; A11
BAGHDAD, Aug. 27 -- Gunmen and bombers claimed at least 69 lives in Iraq on Sunday, even as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki repeated the assertions of Iraqi and U.S. leaders that violence was easing from a wartime high set earlier this summer.
While U.S. and Iraqi forces have deployed additional troops in Baghdad to deal with the surge of sectarian violence, the deadliest of the attacks Sunday occurred outside the capital, in cities to the north.
The attention of Iraqi and U.S. officials since this spring has been focused on the rivalry between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Muslims in Baghdad. Sunday's violence, however, highlighted the country's many other dangers since the war began: rising crime and growing tensions among Iraq's other faiths and peoples.
The most lethal attack came in the town of Khalis, near Baqubah, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. Gunmen stormed the house of a local judge, Hamdi al-Ubaidi, shot one of his brothers and moved to abduct another, police said.
When men from a nearby cafe ran to the aid of the family, gunmen opened fire, killing 12 of the would-be rescuers and injuring 25, police Brig. Safa al Mandalawi said.
The kidnappers escaped, with the judge's brother as their captive, Mandalawi said.
The mass killing came about 11 hours after a bomb planted in a marketplace in Khalis exploded at the height of morning shopping. Nine people died, and 15 were injured, police Lt. Ali Khayam said.
Gunmen killed five people in three other attacks in the nearby city of Baqubah, a community with a heavily nationalist Sunni Arab population that has seen nearly daily violence.
Farther to the north, in the tense oil city of Kirkuk, back-to-back bombings killed 10 people Sunday outside the house of a police colonel and outside a meeting hall of Sufis, a mystical Muslim religious sect.
A top Sufi leader in Fallujah last week declared that his previously nonviolent sect was joining the Sunni insurgency, saying that rising Shiite militancy left him no choice but to fight for survival. It was not known whether Sunday's attack was related to the Sufi leader's call to arms.
Attacks elsewhere in Kirkuk on Sunday targeted offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a member of Iraq's northern-based Kurdish minority. A car bomb at one of the offices killed a guard, while security personnel at another office repelled an assault by gunmen, killing one of the assailants.
Sunni Arabs and Kurds are vying for Kirkuk, one of the country's two main oil centers. A referendum in the city is to determine whether Kirkuk is to come under Kurdish or Arab control. Each side is trying to build up its strength ahead of the vote.
In Iraq's other oil hub, the southern city of Basra, a bomb mounted on a motorcycle killed seven people, authorities said. Maliki, the prime minister, has imposed a state of emergency to deal with the deadly rivalry among the Shiite factions controlling the south.
Another of the day's major attacks was in Baghdad, where a bomb in a minibus killed nine people at a police checkpoint on Sadoun Street, in the center of the city near the Palestine Hotel, police said.
Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman, confirmed that seven Iraqi civilians were killed Sunday night in what Johnson said was a street battle between American forces and insurgents in Baghdad.
It began when a bomb exploded near American troops in a Stryker armored vehicle in the mostly Sunni west Baghdad neighborhood of Ghaziliyah, a district where U.S. forces have beefed up their presence in an effort to quell sectarian violence.
Insurgents opened fire with grenade launchers and guns after the bomb hit the Stryker, Johnson said. U.S. forces returned fire, wounding four attackers, whom Americans took into custody, Johnson said. He said it appeared the civilians had been caught in the cross-fire.
A resident at the scene gave a different account, saying all seven, including a family of five traveling together, were killed when U.S. forces opened fire on cars around their vehicle following the bombing.
Also in Baghdad, three American soldiers were killed, two by roadside bombs and one by insurgent gunfire, the U.S. military said. [Early Monday, the Associated Press reported that four U.S. soldiers were killed Sunday in another roadside bombing, according to U.S. military.]
In Baghdad in particular, the toll reflected the growing aggressiveness of the militias loyal to Iraq's governing Shiite religious parties as they try to crush the country's Sunni insurgency.
U.S. military leaders stepped up American deployments and patrols in Baghdad. U.S. commanders also abruptly extended the stay of one Alaska-based brigade that had been headed home and called in emergency reserves from Kuwait.
U.S. military leaders have credited their crackdown in Baghdad with what they say is a reduction in the number of deaths in Iraq in recent weeks.
"The violence is in decrease and our security ability is increasing," Maliki said on CNN's "Late Edition" program. Multinational forces have created an atmosphere of "reconciliation" in the country, Maliki said, and "Iraq will never be in a civil war."
Maliki's spokesman, Ali Debagh, confirmed Sunday that the prime minister was shuffling the cabinet in his three-month-old government of Shiite religious parties, Kurds and Sunnis.
Debagh said at least one and probably two of the ministers to be replaced belong to the movement of populist Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Sadr commands a militia increasingly accused of taking a lead in killings of Sunnis.
Debagh played down the idea that the shuffle was largely a purge of Sadr supporters. Debagh said Sadr "is more and more coming to work as a political force" within the government while disavowing his militia.
Special correspondents Saad al-Izzi in Baghdad and other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report.