BAGHDAD -- Signs emerged Tuesday of a reprisal sectarian slaughter of Sunnis in Iraq, and police said pro-government Shiite militiamen killed nearly four dozen inmates after insurgents tried to storm the jail northeast of Baghdad.
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A morgue official said many of the detainees had bullet wounds in the head and chest, though the Iraqi military insisted that the Sunni inmates were killed by mortar shells in the attack on the facility outside the city of Baqouba.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, the bullet-riddled bodies of four men in their late 20s or early 30s, presumably Sunnis, were found at different locations in the Shiite neighborhood of Benouk, said police and morgue officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk with the media.
Also Tuesday, a car bomb in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City district killed 12 people and wounded 30 in a crowded outdoor market, police and hospital officials said. No one claimed responsibility for the bombing, but attacks targeting Shiite districts are routinely the work of Sunni militants.
The Sadr City deaths raise to at least 22 the number of people killed in violence in Baghdad on Tuesday.
The allegation of Shiite killings of Sunnis near Baqouba and in Baghdad hinted at a possible return to the sectarian warfare that nearly tore the country apart in 2006 and 2007.
During the United States' eight-year presence in Iraq, American forces acted as a buffer between the two Islamic sects, though with limited success. The U.S. military withdrew at the end of 2011, but it is now being pulled back in -- albeit so far in far fewer numbers.
The fighting around the jail was the closest to Baghdad since the al-Qaida breakaway group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant began its lightning advance, seizing several key northern cities in the Sunni heartland last week.
There were conflicting details about the clashes in the al-Kattoun district near Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province and one of the bloodiest battlefields of the U.S.-led war, and on how the detainees were killed. The city is 40 miles northeast of the Iraqi capital.
Officers said the local police station, which has a small jail, was attacked Monday night by Sunni militants who arrived in two sedans to free the detainees. The militants fired rocket-propelled grenades at the building before opening fire with assault rifles.
A SWAT team accompanied by Shiite militiamen rushed to scene and asked the local policemen to leave, the officers said. When the policemen later returned to the station, they found 44 detainees dead.
The bodies were taken to the Baqouba morgue, where an official said most had gunshot wounds to the head and chest.
One detainee survived and was taken to the hospital. Police later arrived at the hospital and took the wounded man away, a hospital official said.
The police officers, the hospital and morgue officials all spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing for their own safety.
A different account was provided by Iraq's chief military spokesman, Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi. He said 52 detainees who were held at the station in al-Kattoun died when the attackers from the Islamic State shelled it with mortars.
Nine of the attackers were killed, al-Moussawi said.
The Diyala police chief, Maj. Gen. Jamil Shamri, also said the clashes resulted in the deaths of nine insurgents and one pro-government fighter, and that police had "returned to the station and it is now totally under their control."
The Islamic State group is known to be active in Diyala, a volatile province with a mix of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds and where Shiite militiamen are deployed alongside government forces. Sunni militants have for years targeted security forces and Shiite civilians in the province, which abuts the Iranian border.
The Islamic State has vowed to march to Baghdad,and the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf. The three cities are home to some of the most revered Shiite shrines. The Islamic State also has tried to capture Samarra north of Baghdad, home to another major Shiite shrine.
Iraq has been in danger of sliding back to wholesale Shiite-Sunni bloodletting since Sunni militants seized at least one city and significant parts of the countryside in Anbar province west of Baghdad early this year.
Continuous bombings blamed on Sunni militants in Baghdad and elsewhere, and targeted assassinations of members of both communities have deepened fears of outright sectarian warfare.
The Sunni militants also clashed with Kurds in Kirkuk province late Monday. The dissolution of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's army there in the face of the Islamic State's initial advance last week has allowed the Kurds to seize control of the biggest northern oil field.
Kurdish authorities have told residents not to flee the area and said they would be protected by the Kurdish peshmerga armed forces.
U.S. deploying force
Nearly 300 armed American forces are being positioned in and around Iraq to help secure U.S. assets as President Barack Obama nears a decision on an array of options for combating the Islamic militants, including airstrikes or a contingent of special forces.
The U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq ousted Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim widely despised by many in the nation's Shiite majority. The Shiite-led government that took power after Saddam's fall in turn fostered deep resentments among the nation's minority Sunnis, who complained of being marginalized after dominating Iraqi politics for decades.
The White House has emphasized that any U.S. military engagement in the latest crisis is contingent on the government in Baghdad making political changes.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, speaking during a stop in Brazil on Tuesday, said "Iraqis have to put together and hold together" to end the increasing sectarian violence.
Biden said the U.S. government is "consulting closely with a full range of Iraqi's leaders on an inclusive political path forward even as we provide assistance to Iraq's security forces."
Obama is to meet with the four top U.S. congressional leaders today on his options in Iraq.
Obama planned to discuss foreign policy with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi at the White House.
"I'm anxious to see what plan he might have, given where we are," McConnell, R-Ky., said.
The president informed congressional leaders Monday under the War Powers Act that he will deploy as many as 275 U.S. troops to Iraq to protect the American Embassy and staff members in Baghdad.
The troops, which are ready for combat, will remain available until security improves, the White House said. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad will remain open, although its staff has been reduced.
The U.S. has an array of manned and unmanned aircraft in the region. The aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush, now in the Persian Gulf, has 65 aircraft on board, including 44 F/A-18 fighter-bombers and five EA-6B Prowler electronic jamming aircraft, according to Navy figures.
The carrier is accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea and destroyer USS Truxton.
The U.S. Air Force also has assets at bases in Qatar, Kuwait and other locations, including armed Reaper drones and 90 manned warplanes. The available aircraft include stealthy F-22 fighters, A-10 ground-attack aircraft, F-16 and F-15E fighter-bombers, and B-1B bombers all capable of dropping satellite- or laser-guided bombs.
The Sunni regimes in the Persian Gulf have signaled their reluctance to let U.S. warplanes use bases on their soil to attack fellow Sunnis, even the extremists of the Islamic State, said one U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic communications.
Some regional leaders, the official said, have indicated that they also would consider U.S. military aid to al-Maliki's Shiite-led regime to be indirect support for Iran, a Shiite country and ally of Iraq that they consider an enemy.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and Iran also held an initial discussion on how the longtime foes might cooperate to ease the threat from the al-Qaida-linked militants who have swept through Iraq. Still, the White House ruled out the possibility that Washington and Tehran might coordinate military operations in Iraq.
American intelligence on Iraq has eroded dramatically since Obama withdrew the last U.S. troops from the country at the end of 2011, U.S. officials said on the condition of anonymity because they aren't authorized to discuss intelligence matters or internal policy discussions publicly.
Since then, they said, U.S. military and intelligence agencies increasingly have relied on the Iraqi military and government and on public sources for reporting on Sunni insurgent groups such as the Islamic State and Shiite militias, most of them backed by Iran. Many of the reports on Sunni groups, said two officials, have proved to be exaggerated, while those on Shiite forces and the role of Iran's Quds Force and intelligence services in supporting them have been sketchy at best.
Further complicating matters, Islamic State leaders communicate largely by couriers rather than making mobile phone calls that the U.S. National Security Agency can intercept, said another U.S. official.
Some of the most damaging intelligence losses, this official said, have come in Sunni areas such as Anbar province, where the U.S. military and the Central Intelligence Agency built close relations with tribal leaders who now think the Americans abandoned them after 2011.
"Any solution to the current crisis has to recognize that the Sunni Arab community has to be part of a more inclusive government," said Daniel Green, who worked with Sunni tribes in Fallujah as a Navy officer in 2007 and is now a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Information for this article was contributed by Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Sameer N. Yacoub, Hamza Hendawi and staff members of The Associated Press; by Nabih Bulos and Patrick J. McDonnell of the Los Angeles Times; and by David Lerman, Tony Capaccio, Gopal Ratnam, John Walcott, Nicole Gaouette, Phil Mattingly and Derek Wallbank of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 06/18/2014