Sunnis Accuse Shiites in Mass Killings

A recent surge in killings with sectarian overtones has left at least two dozen Iraqis dead, angering the country’s Sunni Arab minority as negotiations to draw them into a future government continue.

On Saturday, authorities identified two groups of corpses as those of young Sunni Arab men dumped in separate locations in a poor neighborhood of northwestern Baghdad.

The men had recently been detained by Iraqi security forces, and all the bodies bore signs of torture, Sunni Arab political and religious leaders said.

“They are raiding homes and mosques and making random arrests,” said Harith Obeidi, a leader of a Sunni group that is part of negotiations to form a new government. “The people are in government cars and wearing the government uniforms. They arrest people and beat them during the raids, and after two days we find them killed on the road or at the morgue.”

Sunni political officials allege that since May at least 1,600 Sunni Arabs have disappeared after such raids without any accounting for their whereabouts.

“To date, the results of the investigations did not come out,” said a statement issued last week by the Iraqi Accordance Front, the main Sunni Arab political coalition now in talks to join the government.

Sunnis dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s regime. Majority Shiites, oppressed for centuries by successive Sunni rulers, have come to the political fore since the U.S.-led invasion upended Iraq’s political order nearly three years ago.

A Sunni-driven insurgency has carried out a campaign of bombings and assassinations against the new Shiite-led government. Shiites control the security forces that stand accused by U.S. officials and human rights observers of spawning death squads that target the Sunni Arab community.

Sunni Arab leaders have been pressuring Iraq’s Shiite and Kurdish leaders to remove Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, who has been accused of having close ties to a Shiite militia. The Sunnis used the recent upsurge in reported killings to underscore their contention that Jabr must go.

The two most recent batches of corpses were identified as those of men arrested in raids on two mosques, one Jan. 30 in Baghdad and another Thursday near Taji, north of the capital, Sunni leaders said.

Iraqi government authorities said they were investigating both incidents.

Sectarian killings, widely suspected of being carried out by members of militias with ties to the security forces, subsided during the period around the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections but have since resumed.

In the incident near Taji, uniformed men burst into a mosque and arrested nine worshipers, said witnesses, Sunni party officials and a police officer in the area.

Iraqi police Lt. Adnan Agadi said the nine men detained were members of the Dulaimi tribe, a large mostly Sunni Arab clan believed to have strong ties to the insurgency.

Iraqi political leaders said the bodies later were found in a dump in the Shula district of Baghdad, a poor, crowded Shiite neighborhood in western Baghdad that abuts Sunni Arab farmlands thought to be a haven for insurgents.

Fourteen more bodies were discovered Friday in the same area. The Muslim Scholars Assn., a hard-line Sunni Arab clerical group, said the bodies were those of men arrested during a raid west of Baghdad. All had been shot in the head.

“Ministry of Interior forces continuously practice arrests and eliminations of such a kind out of purely sectarian motives,” said a report issued by the association.

Some leaders say the increasing sectarian tensions are changing the demography of the country.

Obeidi, the Sunni political official, said Sunni families have left mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad such as Shula or nearby Ghazaliya and moved to Sunni Arab strongholds such as Ramadi, in volatile Al Anbar province.

U.S. officials believe that bringing disgruntled Sunni Arabs into a broad-based government could be a major step in drawing down the insurgency. But the treatment of Sunni Arab prisoners detained by Iraqi and U.S. authorities has become a major stumbling block in getting Iraq’s Sunnis to participate in the government.

The Iraqi Accordance Front issued a statement Wednesday saying that U.S. and Iraqi forces must stop harassment and detention of Sunnis, kick Jabr out of office and stop raids in Sunni Arab parts of the country before it will consider joining the government.

U.S. officials in Iraq, including Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, have also pressured the Shiites, who garnered the most votes in elections last year, to hand the sensitive Interior Ministry post to someone perceived as less sectarian than Jabr.

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Staff writers Saif Rasheed and Shamil Aziz in Baghdad and a special correspondent in Taji contributed to this report.