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In Balad, Age-Old Ties Were 'Destroyed in a Second'
Over the weekend, workers at a hospital morgue in Tikrit unloaded bodies of people killed over the four days of sectarian violence in and around Balad.
(By Bassim Daham -- Associated Press)
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Balad's Shiite leaders asked for protection by the Mahdi Army, and for the militia to exact revenge, Taysser Musawi, a Shiite cleric in Balad, later recounted.
The Kadhimiyah branch of the Madhi Army responded, Ammar Joda al-Musawi, a spokesman for the militia brigade, said at his office in Baghdad.
"It was like an SOS call," Musawi recalled. "To protect them from being killed by the Salafis who are killing followers of the prophet" Muhammad, he added, referring respectively to the Sunni insurgents and the Shiites.
Mahdi Army fighters in plain clothes crowded into two buses and headed to Balad, Musawi said. More Mahdi Army fighters followed in army uniforms and army vehicles, Musawi said. Others wore the blue-and-white camouflage pants that Iraq's Interior Ministry commandos wear, but with black T-shirts to distinguish them from the real commandos.
By early in the day on Oct. 14, a Saturday, the Shiite forces had assembled to rid Balad of Sunnis.
Mosque loudspeakers blared warnings for all Sunnis to leave the city within 48 hours, residents recalled. Gunmen in uniforms and civilian clothes took control of Balad's streets and outlying roads, police and residents said.
The Shiite gunmen set up checkpoints, quizzing occupants of each passing vehicle about whether they were Shiite or Sunni.
Um Mustafa, 37, a dentist from Balad, lost her husband at one such checkpoint. The Sunni couple and their two young children had tried to flee the city at 7 a.m. that Sunday. But armed men in black were waiting at one checkpoint.
A hooded man among them pointed to Um Mustafa's husband, she recounted later. This man is a Sunni, the hooded man told the Shiite gunmen, and he served as a colonel in Saddam Hussein's army. The Shiite gunmen bashed her husband in the face with the butts of their rifles, Um Mustafa recalled.
"My husband was screaming, 'God! God!' " she said. "And they were saying, 'Do not mention God, you infidel.' "
Gunmen put her bloodied husband in a white sport-utility vehicle and drove away. Um Mustafa, now sheltered with strangers outside Balad with her 11-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter, found her husband's body the next day in Balad's morgue.
By the end of Saturday, the U.S. forces had learned about the mass killings underway in Balad, Caldwell, the military spokesman, said in Baghdad. A platoon-size quick-reaction force was dispatched that same day, he said.
