BAGHDAD — A forbidden love affair that ended with a young woman being stoned to death led to more bloodshed Sunday when gunmen dragged 21 members of a religious minority off a bus and shot them dead, Iraqi police and witnesses said.
The incident in the northern city of Mosul was shocking in its brutality and frightening for the specter it raised: that violence between Muslims and non-Muslims could aggravate the already volatile ethnic conflict there between Arabs and Kurds. The victims were Yazidis, an ancient sect that is neither Christian nor Muslim and whose Kurdish followers have faced persecution under a succession of rulers.
Baghdad also was rocked by violence Sunday. Two attacks involving car bombs killed at least 19 people in the capital. One targeted a police station being used as temporary quarters for officers whose station had been destroyed in a bomb blast.
A U.S. military plan to wall off an especially volatile neighborhood of Baghdad appeared on the verge of collapse after Prime Minister Nouri Maliki joined the chorus of complaints about the project, which critics say will worsen relations between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
At a news conference in Cairo, Maliki said there were other ways to keep neighborhoods safe, the Associated Press reported. "I oppose the building of the wall, and its construction will stop," he said.
American troops began building the 12-foot-high wall around the Sunni area of Adhamiya on April 10 as part of a U.S.-Iraqi security plan to calm Baghdad. The U.S. military had portrayed it as the best method to stop violence in Adhamiya, which is surrounded by Shiite districts.
In a statement late Sunday, the U.S. military said that it was aware of Maliki's statements and would work with the Iraqi government and military "to establish effective security measures."
Police in Mosul said the slayings of the Yazidis took place in the evening. Men in two cars blocked off a road, stopping a bus taking employees of a weaving factory home. The men then separated the Yazidis from the other passengers and shot them dead, police Capt. Ibrahim Jaboori said.
Police and residents of Bashiqa, where most of the victims lived, linked the attack to the stoning death there this month of a Yazidi woman. She was slain by fellow Yazidis angry over her conversion to Islam and love affair with a Sunni man.
