Report: Four Kurdish militiamen found executed in northern Iraq

Sep 28, 2009, 11:12 GMT

Baghdad - Police in northern Iraq on Monday found the bodies of four Kurdish peshmerga militiamen executed by the side of a road near Mosul, police told Baghdad's Buratha news agency.

Police on a regular patrol of the road between Mosul and the nearby town of Tel Afar found the four bodies with multiple gunshot wounds to the head, the news agency reported, and brought them to Tel Afar for return to their families.

Mosul and its environs, roughly 400 kilometres north of Baghdad, are among the most ethnically and religiously diverse areas in Iraq. The area also remains one of the most prone to violence, subject to near-daily, deadly attacks.

Political tensions have been particularly high in recent months, as the Arab-nationalist provincial government elected in January has sought to bring in Arab-Iraqi forces to replace Kurdish peshmerga militiamen who continue to police the eastern region of the province bordering the semi-autonomous Kurdish region.

On Sunday, a child was killed and four others were wounded when an improvised explosive device exploded in a garbage dump in the western Mosul neighbourhood of al-Tank, police told the Aswat al-Iraq news agency.

Police on Sunday told the German Press Agency dpa that a woman who worked as a nurse at a nearby hospital had been abducted from her home in the city.

The abduction came a day after insurgents 'laid siege' to the Tel Atba region, 80 kilometres west of the city, preventing trucks from bringing supplies to the region. The move came after residents refused to work with them, Aswat al-Iraq reported, citing the leader of the local, government-allied, Sahwa, or 'Awakening,' militia.