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azinorum -> RE: COWARDS and SCUM! (4/23/2007 4:02:19 AM)
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Now its the Yezidis turn. God help us. BAGHDAD (AP) _ Gunmen in northern Iraq stopped a bus filled with Christians and members of a tiny religious sect on Sunday, police said, separating out the groups and taking 23 of the passengers away to be shot. The attack came on a day of heavy violence in Baghdad, with at least 20 people killed in car bombings, most in a double suicide strike against a police station in a religiously mixed neighborhood. Explosions also rocked the heavily fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad in an apparent mortar attack for the second consecutive day, sending black smoke billowing into the sky, but the U.S. military said no casualties were immediately 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 al-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, which has a mixed population of Christians and Yazidis. 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 to death, al-Wagga said. After the killings, hundreds of Yazidis took to the streets of Bashika, a town in Ninevah province that is 80 percent Yazidi, 15 percent Christian and about five percent Muslim. Shops were shuttered and many Muslims closed themselves in their homes, fearing reprisal attacks. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, a provincial police spokesman said the executions were in response to the killing two weeks ago of a Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam after she fell in love with a Muslim and ran off with him. Disapproving relatives dragged her back to Bashika, where she was stoned to death, he said. A grainy video showing gruesome scenes of the stoning was distributed on Iraqi Web sites in recent weeks. A Muslim man who said he was on the bus but was released with six Christians said 10 gunmen had stopped the bus, then ordered the driver to steer it into a narrow alley, where they ordered the passengers off the bus and separated them according to their identification cards, which indicate the holders' religion. "Then they asked the Yazidis to get back on the bus. The gunmen started to shout 'God curse your devil' and they were telling the Yazidis that 'It is not your business if the woman decided to convert to Islam," Mustafa Ali Mustafa said.
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