NOTE: The following text is a quote:
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=32894
Afghan, Coalition Forces Kill Two, Capture 12 in Raids
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, April 22, 2007 – Coalition and Afghan forces killed two and captured 12 militants in separate raids yesterday.
—Combined forces killed one and captured nine in an early morning raid on a militant compound in Nangarhar province. The militants are suspected of coordinating several suicide attacks in recent weeks.
— In another early-morning raid yesterday in Helmand province, coalition and Afghan forces killed an armed suspect.
— Coalition and Afghan forces in Khowst province detained three men yesterday at a compound where militants are linked to the Haqqani network and suspected of extremist activities. One suspect was armed and was subdued by combined forces without incident.
There were no injuries to any coalition or Afghan forces in any of the raids.
On April 20, Afghan locals from the Qaleh Shahi Village, Nangarhar province, reported a munitions cache to Afghan National Police and coalition forces. The weapons cache, hidden in a vacant compound in the village, stored 15 82 mm recoilless rifle rounds and 62 various models of rocket-propelled-grenade rounds.
In the past three weeks, munitions caches have been found in 75 percent of the districts in Nangarhar province, U.S> officials said.
(Compiled from Combined Joint Task Force 82 news releases)
PERSECUTION.ORG
http://www.persecution.org
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Note: The following text is a quote:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/016162.php
April 22, 2007
Gunmen stop bus carrying Christians, Yazidis in northern Iraq, kill 23
All of the dead appear to be Yazidis, apparently killed in revenge after a Yazidi woman who converted to Islam was stoned to death by relatives. In response, the gunmen killed 23 Yazidis, and one can’t rule out further reprisals. “Gunmen kill 23 from tiny sect in Iraq,” by Lauren Frayer for The Associated Press:
BAGHDAD - Gunmen in northern Iraq stopped a bus filled with Christians and members of a tiny, mostly Kurdish 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 violent day 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.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, on a tour abroad to ask the Arab world’s Sunni-led governments 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.”
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.
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 released from the bus with six Christians said 10 gunmen stopped the vehicle, then ordered the driver to steer it into a narrow alley, where they ordered the passengers off 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,” said the passenger, Mustafa Ali Mustafa.
Posted by Marisol at April 22, 2007 02:20 PM