Gunmen kill 14 travellers in ambush at fake checkpoint in Iraq
Gunmen ambushed a group of travellers at a fake checkpoint at a remote desert site in western Iraq yesterday and killed at least 14 of them, according to Iraqi officials, in what appeared to be the latest blow in sectarian violence gripping the country.
The gunmen, apparently looking for Shiites to kill, struck near the town of Nukhaib. The town, near the site of a deadly 2011 ambush, sits at a desert crossroads west of the Shiite holy city of Karbala, but is in the Sunni-dominated Anbar province.
The assailants manning the fake highway checkpoint checked the identities of travellers, presumably to identify their sect based on their names, according to officials. Police said they found blood-stained IDs on the ground identifying some of the dead as coming from Karbala, 100 kilometres south of Baghdad.
Officials said the 14 victims of yesterday's attack were shot in the head. They said the dead included police and soldiers, as well as civilian residents of the overwhelmingly Shiite Karbala.
Iraqi officials believe Sunni insurgents including al-Qaeda's Iraq branch as well as loyalists of Saddam Hussein's former regime are responsible for much of the violence against Shiites and government security forces, which are dominated by the Muslim sect.
Mohammed al-Moussawi, a provincial councilman in Karbala, confirmed that four of the dead ambushed were civilians from the province.
The area around Nukhaib, near where the killings happened, was the site of an eerily similar September 2011 ambush on a bus carrying Shiite pilgrims.
In that attack, uniformed gunmen set up a fake checkpoint and hijacked a bus from Karbala that was carrying Shiite pilgrims heading to the Sayida Zeinab shrine in Syria. They told the women and children to stay aboard while 22 men were marched out and shot dead.
