Iraq: US raids kill at least 38, gunmen execute at least 11 villagers

Gunmen dressed in Iraqi army uniforms swept into a village south of Baghdad early Friday, abducting 13 civilians and killing at least 11 of them, police said. The attack occurred around 5 a.m. local time in Imam village, a predominantly Shiite town about 50 miles south of the Iraqi capital.

According to the AP, some two hours after the abduction, police found eleven bodies with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. An Iraqi army spokesman acknowledged that the gunmen wore Iraqi army uniforms and drove military vehicles, but said they were not government soldiers.

Meanwhile, a U.S. air strike killed 8 “insurgents” near Baghdad on Thursday, the U.S. military said on Friday. It added U.S. forces were conducting a raid in the Arab Jbour area near Baghdad when they came under heavy fire and had to call in air support. “Eight terrorists barricaded themselves inside one of the buildings and continued to fire at the ground forces,” a statement said.

 

“Coalition aircraft dropped precision bombs on the building, resulting in its destruction and the deaths of the eight terrorists,” it said, according to Reuters.

Also on Thursday, U.S. forces said they killed 13 “insurgents” in an air strike targeting a “senior foreign fighter facilitator” northeast of the town of Ameriya, near Fallujah. A doctor at a local hospital said 30 bodies, including those of seven children, had been brought in from the village of Zaidan, near Ameriya.