http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060902/wl_nm/iraq_dc_28
Sad day for South Asian Muslims. Iraqi Terrorists killed Pakistani and Indian Shia pilgrims.
Pakistani, Indian pilgrims slain in Iraq
By Ross Colvin 1 hour, 56 minutes ago
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Fourteen Pakistani and Indian Shi’ite pilgrims were abducted and killed in
Iraq’s western desert, police said on Saturday, a day after the
Pentagon warned that sectarian strife there had created the risk of civil war.
The 11 Pakistanis and three Indians, all male, had been traveling to holy Shi’ite sites in Iraq on Thursday when they were attacked in Anbar province, heartland of the Sunni insurgency, Iraqi and Indian officials said.
An official at the al-Hussein hospital in the Shi’ite holy city of Kerbala, where the bodies were taken on Friday, said the 14 men had their hands bound and had been shot in the head. Some had been tortured and one was partially decapitated.
Pakistan said it strongly condemned the killings and again warned its citizens against traveling to Iraq.
An attack on a revered Shi’ite shrine in February has unleashed bloodletting between majority Shi’ites and minority Sunni Muslims who were politically dominant under
Saddam Hussein and now form the backbone of the insurgency.
The 63-page Pentagon assessment released on Friday said “conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq.” “Nevertheless, the current violence is not a civil war, and movement toward a civil war can be prevented,” it added.
Key to Washington’s strategy of averting all-out sectarian conflict has been the build-up of Iraqi security forces to help enforce the authority of Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government, which has so far failed to quell the violence.
A ceremony in which Iraq was to assume operational command of its new armed forces from U.S.-led troops was postponed on Saturday at the last minute amid confusion, a U.S. military spokesman said, citing poor planning.
Shi’ite pilgrims are a frequent target for insurgents, and Indian and Pakistani officials said they had issued warnings against travel to Iraq, home to many Shi’ite holy sites.
TRAVEL ADVICE IGNORED
“We had much earlier issued a travel advisory against going to Iraq. I’m sorry it has been disregarded,” Indian junior Foreign Minister E. Ahamed told Reuters.
Ahamed said the 14 victims had been part of a larger group of 40 people who had crossed into Iraq after touring holy sites in Jordan and
Syria.
To get to Kerbala they had to cross the western desert of Anbar province, where the Sunni rebellion is strongest and U.S. forces suffer their heaviest casualties.
Ahamed said gunmen had stopped the convoy and separated the men from the women in the party, which included 14 Indians and 26 Pakistanis. Police found the bodies of the men in neighboring Kerbala province the following day, he said.
A morgue official at Kerbala hospital said the pilgrims would be buried in Kerbala and that Islamic rites were being performed on their bodies.
A statement purportedly from al Qaeda’s Iraqi umbrella group last week urged Sunnis to launch a holy war against Shi’ites.
The Pentagon report said the core conflict in Iraq had changed from a battle against insurgents to the increasingly bloody fight between Shi’ites and Sunnis.
Sectarian violence is spreading north, outside of Baghdad into Diyala province and oil-rich Kirkuk, it said. Death squads, sometimes with “rogue elements” of U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces, are heavily responsible for the sectarian violence, including execution-style killings.
The United States has boosted its Iraq force to 140,000, the most since January, with 15,000 combat troops in Baghdad trying to halt the slide into all-out civil war.
Saturday’s ceremony to hand over operational command of Iraq’s army from U.S. commander General George Casey to the Iraqi Defense Ministry had been hailed by U.S. officials as a big step toward Iraq taking responsibility for security.
“There was an error in planning between us and the Iraqi defense minister over the ceremony,” U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson said after it was postponed at the last minute.
Johnson played down suggestions the glitch reflected logistic and communication problems between the two forces and said the ceremony would now take place on Sunday.
(Additional reporting by Robert Birsel in Islamabad, Will Dunham in Washington, N. Ananthanarayanan in New Delhi and Alastair Macdonald, Ibon Villelabeitia, and Mussab Al-Khairalla in Baghdad) ((Writing by Ross Colvin, editing by Peter Millership)