Gunmen kill 23 members of Yazidi Kurd
religious
April 23, 2007
GUNMEN killed 23 members of the Yazidi
religious minority in northern Iraq after stopping their bus and separating them
from followers of other faiths, police said.
Yazidis are a small group concentrated mostly around the northern city of Mosul,
360km northwest of Baghdad. They are primarily Kurdish, and worship an angel
figure that some Muslims and Christians consider the devil.
Armed men in several cars stopped the bus as it was carrying workers from the
Mosul Textile Factory to their hometown of Bashika, which has a mixed Christian
and Yazidi population. The gunmen checked passengers' identification and then
asked all Christians to get off the bus, said police Brigadier Mohammed al-Wagga.
They hijacked the bus with all the Yazidis still inside and drove them to
eastern Mosul, where they were lined up along a wall and shot dead
execution-style, Mr al-Wagga said.
After the killings, hundreds of Yazidis took to the streets of Bashika. Shops
were shuttered and many Muslim residents locked themselves in their homes,
fearing reprisal attacks. Police set up additional checkpoints across the city.
Bashika is about 80 per cent Yazidi, 15 per cent Christian and five per cent
Muslim.
A police spokesman for Ninevah province, of which Mosul is the provincial
capital, said the executions were in response to the killing two weeks ago of a
Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam.
The woman had fallen in love with a Muslim man, then converted to Islam and ran
off with him, said police spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf. Her relatives
disapproved of the match and dragged her back to Bashika, where she was stoned
to death, he said.
A grainy video showing gruesome scenes of the woman's killing was distributed on
Iraqi websites in recent weeks, but its authenticity could not be independently
confirmed.
These latests killings by Muslim extremists were an attempt to avenge the
woman's death, Mr Khalaf said.
