A mass killing, other attacks leave 69 dead across Iraq

BAGHDAD -- Gunmen and bombers killed 69 people in Iraq yesterday, including six US soldiers, even as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki repeated the assertions of Iraqi and US leaders that violence was easing from a wartime high earlier this summer.

While US and Iraqi forces have deployed additional troops in Baghdad to deal with the surge of sectarian violence, the deadliest of the attacks yesterday occurred in cities north of the capital.

In one roadside bombing north of Baghdad, four US soldiers were killed, the US military said. Another soldier was killed in a roadside bomb in western Baghdad and the sixth was shot to death in the eastern part of the capital. No other details were released by the military this morning.

The attention of Iraqi and US officials since this spring has been focused on the rivalry between Sunni Arabs and Shi'ite Muslims in Baghdad.

The latest violence, however, highlighted the country's many other dangers since the war began, including rising crime and growing tensions among Iraq's other faiths.

The most lethal attack was in the town of Khalis, near Baqubah, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. Gunmen stormed the house of a local judge, Hamdi al-Ubaidi, shot one of his brothers, and moved to abduct another, police said.

When men from a nearby cafe ran to the aid of the family, gunmen opened fire, killing 12 of the would-be rescuers and injuring 25, police Brigadier Safa al-Mandalawi said.

The kidnappers escaped, with the judge's brother as their captive, Mandalawi said.

The mass killing occurred about 11 hours after a bomb planted in a marketplace at Khalis exploded at the height of morning shopping. Nine people were killed, and 15 were injured, police Lieutenant Ali Khayam said.

Gunmen killed five people in three attacks in nearby Baqubah, a community with a heavily nationalist Sunni Arab population.

Farther to the north, in the tense oil city of Kirkuk, back-to-back bombings killed 10 people yesterday outside the house of a police colonel and outside a meeting hall of Sufis, a mystical Muslim religious sect.

A top Sufi leader in Fallujah had earlier declared that his previously nonviolent sect was joining the Sunni insurgency, saying rising Shi'ite militancy left him no choice but to fight for survival.

Attacks elsewhere in Kirkuk targeted offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of President Jalal Talabani, a member of Iraq's northern-based Kurdish minority. A car bomb at one of the offices killed a guard, while security personnel at another office repelled an assault by gunmen, killing one of the assailants.

In Iraq's other oil hub, the southern city of Basra, a bomb mounted on a motorcycle killed seven people, authorities said. Maliki, the prime minister, has imposed a state of emergency to deal with deadly rivalry among Shi'ite factions controlling the south.

In Baghdad a bomb in a minibus killed nine people at a police checkpoint.

A US military spokesman confirmed that seven Iraqi civilians were killed last night in a street battle between American forces and insurgents in Baghdad.