Iraq's tribes pledge to fight militants as violence rages

Bombers and gunmen killed eight people in Iraq today as security forces prepared to further tighten security ahead of the holy month of Ramadan, when violence traditionally spikes across the country.

Meanwhile, tribes in one of Iraq’s most volatile provinces have joined together to fight the insurgency in their region, and have called on the government and the US-led military coalition for weapons, a prominent tribal leader said.

Tribal leaders and clerics in Ramadi, the capital of the violent Anbar province, met last week and have set up a force of about 20,000 men “ready to purge the city of these infidels,” Sheikh Fassal al-Guood, a prominent tribal leader from Ramadi, said, referring to the insurgents.

“People are fed up with the acts of those criminals who take Islam as a cover for their crimes,” he said. “The situation in the province is unbearable, the city is abandoned, most of the families have fled the city and all services are poor.”

Al-Guood said 15 of the 18 tribes in Ramadi “have sworn to fight those who are killing Sunnis and Shiites and they established an armed force of about 20,000 young men ready to purge the city from those infidels".

In another development, the Iraqi army’s 4th division took over operational control of central Salahuddin province from the Coalition, the government said.

It was the second of Iraq’s 10 divisions to come under direct Iraqi control since September 7, when coalition forces handed over control of Iraq’s armed forces command to the government. Despite the handover, nearly all the country’s troops remain under American control.

Violence has continued around the country.

Two suicide car bombers attacked a police station in Ramadi, killing at least two police officers and injuring 26 people, the Interior Ministry said. The al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera television channels, however, reported that 13 people had been killed in the blast. The ministry said 18 of the 26 injured were police officers.

In Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, three Iraqi army soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb blast that targeted their patrol. A gunman on a motorcycle killed a woman and a group attacked a family in their home, killing two brothers. In Muqdadiyah to the northeast, an armed group killed two civilians.

In the southern city of Basra, police found the body of Lt. Col. Fawzi Abdul Karim al-Mousawi, chief of the city’s anti-terrorism department. Al-Mousawi was kidnapped late on Sunday outside his home by a group of armed men in two cars. He had been handcuffed and shot seven times.

In Hillah, south of Baghdad, gunmen killed a former member of the defunct Ba’th Party, while police in eastern Baghdad found the bodies of three men. All were bound, blindfolded and had been shot in the head.

The violence came after a particularly bloody day in northern Iraq and as the government prepared to announce new security measures for the capital ahead of Ramadan, which is expected to start on September 24.

On Sunday, six bombs killed 24 people and wounded 84 in Kirkuk, a city 180 miles north of Baghdad that lies in the center of Iraq’s vast northern oil fields and is the subject of rival claims by the region’s Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen.