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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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The U.S. soldiers asked the Balad officials whether they wanted help, Caldwell said, but the officials declined the offer. The Iraqi government made no request for assistance, he said.
Caldwell described Shiite officials in the town as seemingly interested only in receiving local intelligence from the Americans.
The U.S. military spokesman said he did not know whether U.S. forces intervened. By Sunday, American forces had received reports of at least 57 people slain.
The Balad morgue had received about 80 bodies by Tuesday, hospital officials said. Most were Sunnis, and all had been shot; some bore the holes of electric drills.
The Iraqi government ordered in national police commandos, whose forces often have been accused of working with the militias to kill Sunnis.
Forty-eight hours after the attacks on Sunnis started, the Iraqi government ordered in the Iraqi army's 3rd Regiment, 4th Division from outside Balad, Iraqi army officials said.
Residents credited the Iraqi army forces, many of them Sunni Arabs and Kurds, with finally quelling the violence.
By then, however, very few Sunnis were left in Balad.
Munthir Lattif, 27, who stayed in the city, called around and found only five or six other Sunni families still in Balad, he said Thursday.
"We are living in a very difficult situation," he said in an interview at his home. He, his wife and their four children slept on the roof of their home at night, ready to jump to neighboring rooftops if the Shiite gunmen came to their door.
Lattif said his family had only rice and mandarin oranges to eat. The siege of the city by the Sunni insurgents had cut off most food deliveries into Balad.
With no customers and no food left to sell at his falafel shop, Hussein Abid Ali, a Shiite, nonetheless went to work. He had left home to escape looking into the eyes of his eight hungry children, he said.
