Gunmen in army uniforms seize Sunni official in Baghdad

BAGHDAD — Gunmen in army uniforms have seized a senior local official and prominent member of a Sunni Islamist party from his Baghdad home, police and security sources said on Saturday.

In a sign of the breakdown of security in and around Baghdad, 15 people, including an entire Shiite family, were found shot or beheaded, according to police and medical sources.

It was not clear if Riyadh Al Adhdah, who heads Baghdad’s Provincial Council and belongs to the Sunni Islamist Iraqi Islamic Party, had been kidnapped by militiamen, who often wear military outfits, or detained by the authorities.

A police official speaking on condition of anonymity confirmed that men in army uniforms had taken Adhdah on Friday night.

Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki’s military spokesman was not immediately available for comment on the incident.

Security in Baghdad has been deteriorating as sectarian tensions deepen. The lightning advance of Sunni militants through northern Iraq last month has raised fears that Baghdad will be violently carved up along sectarian lines.

Iraq’s last sectarian civil war reached its peak in 2006-2007 during the US occupation.

Adhdah had previously faced terrorism charges but was not convicted due to a lack of evidence. Sunni politicians have long accused Maliki’s security forces of targeting them on false terrorism-related charges in a witch-hunt.

Sectarian hatred

Tensions between Sunnis and Shiites are increasingly at the forefront of the violence in Iraq, threatening to fragment the country, a major OPEC oil producer.

Gunmen beheaded a Shiite family of five in their home in the town of Taji just north of Baghdad, police and medics said.

Security forces, meanwhile, retrieved the bodies of six men in military trousers who had been handcuffed and shot in the head and chest in Taji, security sources said.

In eastern Baghdad, security forces found the corpses of four men who had been handcuffed, blindfolded and shot execution-style, security sources said.

Sunni insurgents led by the hardline Islamic State seized vast swathes of territory in the north last month, posing the biggest challenge to Maliki’s Shiite-led government since US forces withdrew in 2011.

Iranian-trained Shiite militias accused of sectarian killings have become a powerful force rivaling the battered Iraqi military in its ability to challenge the well-equipped and disciplined militants.

Twelve volunteers fighting alongside the army were killed in clashes with Sunni insurgents near the town of Baqouba, 65km northeast of Baghdad, a military source said.

Kurdish peshmerga forces are also taking on the Islamic State. The two sides have fought each other for control of Jalawla, 115km northeast of the capital in recent weeks.

A senior Kurdish commander was killed in clashes on Saturday and another commander was kidnapped by insurgents in the town, security sources said.

Critics say Maliki, a Shiite, is a divisive figure whose alienation of Sunnis has fuelled sectarian hatred and played into the hands of insurgents.

The head of the provincial council’s security committee told Reuters that Adhdah was seized along with four of his bodyguards from his home in the mostly Sunni district of Adhamiya by men in army uniforms driving SUVs.

Provincial councils are the top tier of local government in a system set up after the US invasion in 2003. Members are elected.

Speaker of Parliament Salim Jabouri, who is also a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said at a press conference after a meeting with Maliki on Saturday that the prime minister had a “big role” to play in Adhdah’s case.

Maliki, who spoke to reporters after Jabouri, did not mention the incident.