KIRKUK – Gunmen stormed the house of a Kurdish policeman yesterday and shot dead his wife and three children while they slept, Iraqi police said, an attack possibly aimed at inciting violence between Arabs and Kurds.
The attack took place in a Kurdish neighbourhood of the disputed northern city of Kirkuk, 250km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, which Iraqi Kurds claim as their ancestral capital and want to annex to their largely autonomous region, something the oil-producing city’s Arab residents reject.
“He came back to his home this morning and found his children and their mother shot in the head while they were asleep,” a police official said, asking not to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
Police and soldiers are a main target of Sunni Islamist insurgents such as al-Qaeda and other groups trying to undermine Iraq’s government and reignite the sectarian slaughter that brought the country to the brink of civil war in 2006-2007.
“We will hunt down the perpetrators of this crime and we will present them to justice, said local police brigadier-general Sarhat Qader.
War between majority Shia Muslims and Sunni Arabs, who were dominant under Saddam Hussein, has abated, but a spate of bombings since US troops pulled out of Iraqi cities in June has cast a cloud over the security gains of the past 18 months.
Five off-duty Iraqi soldiers were killed on Saturday near the city of Baiji, 180km (110 miles) north of Baghdad, when gunmen fired on their car in a drive-by shooting.
US officials are most worried that tensions between Arabs and ethnic Kurds over land, oil and power could trigger Iraq’s next major conflict. They say al-Qaeda and other groups are exploiting those tensions to stage attacks in the north.
Police in Kirkuk issued photographs of the Kurdish policeman’s dead wife and children, aged from one to 3½ years, lying in a bed together. It was not clear if they had been killed in the bed.
In Baghdad yesterday, an American soldier was arrested on suspicion of shooting dead a civilian contractor on the US military’s Camp Speicher, its main base in northern Iraq. The shooting took place yesterday morning, said Derrick Cheng, military spokesman for north Iraq.
“A US soldier has been identified and detained in the alleged shooting incident of a civilian contractor,” he said. “The civilian contractor later died of wounds. We offer our sincere condolences to the family.” – (Reuters)