41 Iraqis freed from insurgent hide-out

U.S. forces freed at least 41 kidnapped Iraqis during a raid Sunday on an Al Qaeda hide-out northeast of Baghdad, the military said. Some of the victims had broken bones and appeared to have been tortured.

The raid came on a day when at least 64 Iraqis were killed or found slain in violence across the country, and the U.S. command announced the deaths of two more American soldiers.

Acting on a tip from local residents, U.S. forces in violence-racked Diyala raided a compound in palm groves south of the province’s capital, Baqubah. There were conflicting accounts of the number of Iraqis freed, with some officers putting the figure at 41 and others at 42.

Individuals believed to have been guarding the site were seen fleeing, but none were detained, said Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly, a spokesman for U.S. forces in northern Iraq.

Some of the captives appeared to be suffering from heat exhaustion. Others gave harrowing accounts of being hung from the ceiling and tortured, said Army Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, another military spokesman. Evidence of abuse, including broken limbs, appeared to back up their account.

Some of the captives said they had been held for as long as four months, Garver said. Most were middle-aged men, but one said he was 14.

The hostages slept in crowded rooms with dirty blankets and pillows; rotting food was scattered around the mud-and-cement compound, the U.S. military said.

The victims were taken to a safe location and getting medical treatment, the military said.

The insurgent hide-out was near Buhriz, a Sunni Arab village about five miles south of Baqubah, U.S. and Iraqi officers said.

Diyala, a religiously mixed province neighboring Baghdad, has long served as a redoubt of Sunni Arab insurgents fighting the U.S. military and the Iraqi government. U.S. officers believe insurgents fleeing a crackdown that began in February in the Iraqi capital also have sought sanctuary there, leading to an escalation of violence. An additional 3,000 forces have been deployed there to help rout them.

U.S. officers said the tips that led to the operation were evidence that residents were turning against the insurgents in their midst.

“This is a sign that the people are fed up with [Al Qaeda in Iraq] doing bad things to good people,” Donnelly said.

“They are communicating a very strong message: We are fed up with this, and we are not going to sit back and do nothing and die.”

One of the two U.S. soldiers killed Saturday died in a roadside bombing in Diyala and the other in a blast in west Baghdad, the military said. Their deaths brought to 3,454 the number of American troops killed in Iraq since March 2003, according to the website icasualties.org, which tracks military casualties.

Meanwhile, police in the capital recovered the bodies of at least 44 men shot and killed execution-style, including 12 abandoned in a lot in a mostly Sunni part of west Baghdad. It was the largest number recovered in a day since the security crackdown began Feb. 13.

Among the fatal attacks of the day, gunmen in three cars tossed smoke grenades into a crowd gathered in a central Baghdad market area and then opened fire, Iraqi police said. Laborers typically assemble there, waiting to be hired for the day for construction and other odd jobs.

A minibus pulled up amid the chaos, and the assailants turned their guns on the vehicle, killing the driver and a passenger, police said. Some of the gunmen then threw the bodies out of the minibus and sped off in the vehicle. Police fired at the departing cars, but there were no reports of arrests. Eight people were wounded in the incident.

A well-known calligrapher was killed in a drive-by shooting while on his way to a Baghdad coffee shop, police said. Two other people were killed and nine injured when mortar rounds slammed into a mostly Shiite part of east Baghdad.

In Al Anbar province, a car bomb ripped through a market in a section of Ramadi dominated by Kurds and other minorities, killing at least seven people and injuring 12, police said. Witnesses said the target was a nearby checkpoint.

Police in the northern city of Kirkuk said the body of a local television employee was found Saturday night in his car, which had been set ablaze. The victim was responsible for music programming for a Kurdish-run station.

In Basra, British forces detained four people and killed three during raids in the southern oil hub, where Shiite militias attacked bases after the killing of a militia leader Friday by Iraqi special forces. One of the detainees was later released.

Gunmen in the city assassinated two other people, one of them a leading local politician.

zavis@latimes.com

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Special correspondents in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Ramadi contributed to this report.