40 kidnapped as sectarian violence escalates in Iraq

Police in Iraq today confirmed the kidnapping of more than 40 Shiites along a notoriously dangerous road just north of Baghdad.

The kidnappings were announced as the death toll from a suicide bombing at a wedding party rose to 23, including nine children.

At least eight other people were found dead or killed in new attacks today, including one person killed in a car bomb attack on Baghdad’s central market of Shurja that also wounded five, police Lt. Ali Hassan said. He said the death toll in the market attack was likely to rise.

The abductions yesterday near the town of Tarmiyah marked a further outbreak of sectarian violence in a region where scores were killed last month in bloody attacks and reprisal killings among formerly friendly Shiite and Sunni neighbours in the city of Balad.

Unarmed men checked identification cards and seemed to be looking for familiar faces among travellers stopped in heavy traffic, said an eyewitness, who asked to be identified only by the pseudonym Abu Omar for fear of reprisals.

Armed gunmen stood nearby during the abductions, just out of sight of US soldiers who were disarming a roadside bomb further down the road, Abu Omar said. He and other Sunni travellers were allowed to travel onward after showing their ID cards, he said.

At least 40 travellers were missing and feared abducted, said an officer at the Joint Co-operation Centre in the city of Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad.

Twelve victims of yesterday’s attack on a Shiite wedding in Baghdad later died from their injuries, adding to the 11 killed in the blast, said Dr. Qassim al-Suwaidi from the al-Sadr hospital. Another 19 were still being treated at the hospital, he said.

The attack, in which a bomber drove an explosives-rigged car into a crowd outside the bride’s home, was grimly similar to recent killings aimed at sparking Shiite retaliation and pushing Iraq toward all-out civil war – a stated goal of the al Qaida in Iraq extremist group.

Police said US and Iraqi forces last night stormed an office in the south-western hamlet of Ahrar belonging to the al-Sadr organisation, sponsors of the feared Mahdi Army militia linked to sectarian murders and other violence.

Troops were supported by US air cover and arrested five followers of radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, said Lt. Mohammed al-Shammari of the provincial police. There were no reports of casualties. The US military had no immediate comment on the report.

US demands for a crackdown on the militia have been a sticking point in relations with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, whose coalition government is heavily dependent on al-Sadr’s political support.

Yesterday, US forces dismantled road blocks around the Mahdi Army’s Baghdad stronghold of Sadr City following an order from the prime minister. That was the latest in a series of challenges to US conduct of the war designed to test Washington’s readiness to give him a greater say in securing the world’s most violent capital.

Aides to the prime minister say he hopes to expand his authority by exploiting the pressure US President George Bush finds himself under over rising voter dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war and the rising US death toll – now at 2,813.

Despite the carnage at home, Maliki’s government recorded progress expanding diplomatic ties, with eight countries agreeing to open Iraqi embassies in their capitals, according to a Foreign Ministry statement.

Commitments have been received from South Korea, Ukraine, Denmark, Slovakia, Serbia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Nigeria, and Foreign Ministry advance teams will be dispatched to make arrangements, the statement said.

Iraq has also moved toward repairing a 24-year breach in formal diplomatic relations with neighbouring Syria. The Syrian foreign minister is considering a visit to Baghdad this month, a Syrian official said, in what would be the first trip by a top Syrian figure since Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003.