BAGHDAD — Gunmen forced their way onto a bus of Shiite pilgrims Monday and shot to death all 22 men onboard as they traveled through western Iraq’s remote desert on a trip to a holy shrine, security officials said.
The bodies were discovered late Monday, hours after the gang stopped the bus at a fake security checkpoint and told all the women and children to get off, according to one security official who interviewed a survivor.
The gunmen then drove the bus a few miles off the main highway between Baghdad and the Jordanian border in Iraq’s Sunni-dominated Anbar province. The pilgrims were ordered off the bus and shot one by one, the security officials said.
“The terrorists stopped the bus at gunpoint and killed 22 men,” said Maj. Gen. Abdul- Hadi Rizayig, the provincial police chief. He said the highway is protected by the Iraqi army.
Shiite pilgrims have been a favorite target for Sunni insurgents who are trying to revive the sectarian violence that brought Iraqi to the brink of civil war a few years ago. The attack Monday comes less than four months before U.S. troops, who surged into Iraq in 2007 to stem the religious killings, are scheduled to leave the country.
In Anbar in particular, many insurgents have launched attacks while posing as soldiers or other security guards. And on Monday, one of the women who was forced off the bus told officials that there were four gunmen who were dressed in military uniforms and stopped the bus at a fake checkpoint.
An army patrol found the deserted women, weeping and wailing, by the side of the highway. Soldiers found the bus a short distance away, loaded the women and children on and headed back to Karbala.
Two Iraqi security officials and a political leader from the southern Iraqi city of Karbala, where the pilgrims were from, confirmed the shooting details. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.
