Insurgents attack sleeping villagers in Iraq

Heavily armed insurgents ambushed sleeping residents of a Shiite village north of Baghdad early Saturday and killed at least 13 people, including a child, police and a Shiite official said.

In Baghdad, political tensions heightened between Sunni Arab lawmakers and Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s Shiite-led government after raids a day earlier on a leading Sunni politician’s home and office. Members of the 44-member Sunni bloc walked out of the parliament session Saturday to protest what they called the house arrest of Adnan Dulaimi. They pledged to boycott legislative sessions until Dulaimi was free to leave his Baghdad home.

Dulaimi said that Iraqi soldiers outside his home had prevented him from going to parliament Saturday and prevented his sister from entering when she came to visit.

The lawmaker is a vocal critic of the government and has accused it of using the raids, and house detention, to try to quiet him.

Security forces detained dozens of Dulaimi’s associates and his son Makki on Friday after a car bomb was found outside Dulaimi’s compound. They have said he is being kept inside for his own safety and have not accused him of being involved with the bomb. They have not announced charges against any of those detained.

The village attack occurred in Dwelah, in volatile Diyala province. An official from a nearby office of Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, who identified himself as Abu Ali, said the dead included a Shiite sheik, Adnan Bawi, three of Bawi’s sons and a 2 1/2 -year-old girl.

Police said the attack began about 6:30 a.m. and involved dozens of suspected Sunni insurgents loyal to the group Al Qaeda in Iraq, which once held large parts of Diyala. A combination of U.S. military offensives and the banding together of Iraqi volunteers opposed to insurgents has weakened militants’ grip on the province, but attacks continue.

According to police, at least 35 people were abducted during the attack. There was no immediate word on their fate.

Meanwhile, there were conflicting reports from Turkey and northern Iraq over Turkish military claims to have inflicted “significant losses” on Kurdish rebels operating along the frontier. A statement posted on the Turkish military’s website said helicopter gunships and artillery were used to target 50 to 60 fighters from the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. The statement said Turkish forces did not cross the border.

PKK and border officials along the frontier, however, denied there had been any attacks. “No confrontations were recorded between us and Turkish troops. Our cities were not bombed,” said a high-ranking PKK official.

Jamal Abdullah, a spokesman for Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan regional government, also denied the Turkish reports. “Border areas are really quiet now,” he said.

Concerns have been growing about a possible Turkish military incursion into northern Iraq since the Turkish parliament in October gave the go-ahead for such an operation. About 100,000 Turkish troops are positioned along the border, which for years has been the scene of skirmishes between Turkish forces and PKK rebels.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have urged diplomacy to avert a major cross-border incursion, which would only add to Iraq’s overall instability at a time when violence is subsiding elsewhere.

Also Saturday, the U.S. military announced the death of an American soldier in a roadside bomb blast in Baghdad. In Anbar province, police in the capital, Ramadi, said they had foiled a major Al Qaeda in Iraq plot to attack the city. A Ramadi police official said two car bombs and several explosive vests were discovered and 12 suspected insurgents were arrested.

Police said they made the arrests after residents told them of a plan to attack Iraqi security forces in Ramadi. The city used to be one of Iraq’s deadliest but now is considered one of its safest because of the movement by Sunni sheiks to fight insurgents.

tina.susman@latimes.com

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Times staff writer Laura King in Istanbul, Turkey, Wail Alhafith in Baghdad and special correspondent Asso Ahmed in northern Iraq contributed to this report.