Baghdad, Iraq – A forbidden love affair that ended with a young woman’s death by stoning led to religiously motivated bloodshed Sunday when gunmen dragged members of a tiny religious minority off a bus and killed 21 of them, police and witnesses said.
The incident in the northern city of Mosul was shocking in its brutality and frightening for the specter it raised – violence between Muslims and non-Muslims aggravating the already volatile conflict involving Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds.
The victims were Yazidis, a sect that is neither Christian nor Muslim and whose followers have faced persecution from a succession of rulers.
Police in Mosul said the slayings of the Yazidis took place Sunday evening as a bus was carrying employees of a weaving factory home after work. Men in two sedans blocked the road on which the bus was traveling, then separated the Yazidis from other passengers before shooting them, said police Capt. Ibrahim Jaboori.
Police and residents of Ba shiqa, home for many of the victims, linked the attack to the stoning death this month of a woman by fellow Yazidis angry over her conversion to Islam and love affair with a Sunni man. The stoning occurred in Ba shiqa, they said, about 20 miles north of Mosul.
The Yazidis practice an ancient religion that includes elements of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and worship the peacock angel, or “Malak Taus,” which appears as a royal-blue peacock.
Baghdad also was rocked by violence Sunday. Two car bombs killed at least 19 people. One blast targeted a police station being used as temporary quarters for officers whose station was destroyed in a bomb blast.
The U.S. military reported the deaths of three soldiers. Two were killed in attacks in Baghdad on Saturday, while the third died from an unidentified noncombat cause.
