By Leila Fadel and Aziz Alwan
Washington Post Foreign Service
BAGHDAD -- Gunmen wearing military uniforms killed at least 25 people, including women and children, shooting them one by one with guns capped with silencers, in a raid late Friday on a neighborhood just south of Baghdad.
Driving pickup trucks usually used by Iraq's federal police, gunmen attacked the neighborhood of Hor Rajib, once paralyzed by Sunni insurgent violence. They gathered a group of Sunni men, known to be members of the Sahwa, or Awakening, Sunni Arabs who stood up to battle insurgents in their neighborhoods at the behest of the U.S. military, officials said.
The gunmen looked through a list of names and then used guns with silencers attached to shoot people one at a time. The victims were largely from the Dulaim tribe, the largest Sunni Arab tribe in Iraq, residents of the area said.
The Friday night attack is one of a series of assassinations and assaults on the Sahwa, also known as the Sons of Iraq, Sunni fighters who began fighting insurgents and militants in their neighborhoods in late 2006 and 2007. Many are former insurgents themselves and were paid by the U.S. military to lay down their weapons and calm violence in their neighborhoods. Along with the U.S. military surge, they are largely credited with lowering the violence in Iraq.
"It seems those criminal gangs of al-Qaeda in Iraq have started to become active again," said Mustafa Kamal Shibeeb, a leader of the Awakening in Arab Jubour, a Sunni Arab area just south of the capital that includes Hor Rajib. "It was a horrific crime, killing these innocents, including women and children".
The incident comes as Iraq's political parties are horse-trading to form the government after the March 7 election. Iraqis worry that the battles for power will leave a security vacuum and violence could consume the streets again.
Iraq's security forces sealed off the area of Dora and Arab Jubour on the southern edge of Baghdad. No one was allowed to leave or enter the area.
The Sons of Iraq were turned over to Iraqi government control gradually in 2008 and 2009. Many leaders of the groups are on the run or in jail and feel targeted by both the Iraqi government and the Sunni extremists they battled.
An official in the Ministry of Interior confirmed the incident.
Special correspondent K.I. Ibrahim contributed to this report
The Washington Post
