Iraq Gunmen Kill Members of Religious Sect

Gunmen in northern Iraq stopped a bus filled with Christians and members of a tiny religious sect yesterday, separating out the groups and taking 23 of the passengers away to be shot.

The attack came on a day of violence in Baghdad, with at least 20 people killed in car bombings, most in a suicide strike against a police station in a religiously mixed neighbourhood.

Explosions also rocked the heavily fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad in an apparent mortar attack for the second consecutive day, but the US military said no casualties were reported.

Police said the execution-style killings of the Yazidis – a primarily Kurdish sect that worships an angel figure considered to be the devil by some Muslims and Christians – appeared to be in response to the stoning death of a Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam.

Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, on a tour abroad to ask the mostly Sunni-led governments of the Arab world to help his struggling government stop the violence in Iraq, said he told Egypt’s president that Iraq’s reality is "not a civil or sectarian war".

In the northern Iraq killings, armed men in several cars stopped the bus as it was carrying workers from the Mosul Textile Factory to their hometown of Bashika.

The gunmen checked passengers’ identification, then asked the Christians to get off the bus, said police Brig. Mohammed al-Wagga.

With the Yazidis still inside, the gunmen drove them to eastern Mosul, where they were lined up along a wall and shot dead, al- Wagga said.

After the killings, hundreds of Yazidis took to the streets of Bashika, a town in Ninevah province that is 80 per cent Yazidi, 15 per cent Christian and about five per cent Muslim.

Shops were shuttered and many Muslims closed themselves in their homes, fearing reprisal attacks.

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