Two weeks before the massacre of almost 50 Iraqi national guard recruits on Saturday, 17 national guardsmen were shot execution-style at their base near the Syrian border, apparently with the aid of Iraqi police, U.S. officials said.
The national guard compound in Karabilah near the town of Husaybah and the U.S. Marine base at al-Qaim then were leveled by explosives.
Eleven Iraqi national guard soldiers died in the Oct. 12 attack and six others survived their gunshot wounds, U.S. officials said.
These officials said the soldiers were forced to kneel facing a wall and then were killed with a combination of AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.
Because of incidents involving Iraqi security forces, the U.S. military has been spray-painting the shell casings of the ammunition given to each of the divisions.
The spent shells found at the site compound where the Iraqi soldiers were executed were red, the color earmarked for the Iraqi police force, one military official said.
Iraqis perceived to be helping the U.S.-led coalition have been increasingly under attack; more than 800 have been killed in Iraq in the past year and many more wounded, according to U.S. estimates.
Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi blamed the coalition for Saturday’s ambush and execution of soldiers returning home from initial training. They were traveling in four vans, and apparently were forced to stop along the road by a checkpoint and then were fatally shot.
“There was great negligence on the part of some coalition forces,” Mr. Allawi told the Iraqi National Council in Baghdad yesterday.
The Iraqi soldiers killed Saturday were unarmed, press reports said.
The soldiers killed Oct. 12, however, were armed and on the job.
Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan blamed the recruits, who in their eagerness to get home left immediately after their graduation and took an unauthorized route, the Associated Press reported.
“They are to blame. They graduated at 12 p.m. and could have delayed their trip,” Mr. Shaalan said in an interview with Al Arabiya television.
The U.S. command did not respond directly to Mr. Allawi’s comments, but said in a statement: “This was a cold-blooded and systematic massacre by terrorists. They and no one else must be held fully accountable for these heinous acts.”
In other developments yesterday, a video on an Islamist Web site showed a captive that it said was a Japanese man kidnapped by Abu Musab Zarqawi’s group and threatened to behead him within 48 hours unless Japan pulls its troops out of Iraq.
In Japan, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi reiterated today that he will not withdraw Japanese troops from Iraq in response to demands from kidnappers, saying, “I cannot allow terrorism and cannot bow to terrorism.”
“The Self-Defense Forces will not withdraw,” Mr. Koizumi told reporters after press reports of the hostage-taking.
Militants yesterday made a new threat of nationwide attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces “with weapons and military tactics they have not experienced before” if American forces try to storm the militant stronghold of Fallujah.
U.S. forces have ratcheted up their aerial and artillery assaults against Fallujah, using precision air strikes to destroy safe houses, command centers, and weapons storage belonging to Zarqawi’s network. An aide to Zarqawi was killed during an overnight strike, the U.S. military said.
On Oct. 10, Iraqi national guard soldiers aided in a border police operation in which two smugglers or militants were killed, U.S. officials said. Two days later, a militant force of fewer than 20 attacked the Karabilah compound.
An initial report said the conflict was tribal. All the national guard soldiers in the town are from one tribe, and the Iraqi police are from another.
The remaining Iraqi national guard members retreated to a phosphate plant protected by U.S. Marines in al-Qaim, a senior military official said.
Iraqi police also took their families with them from Husaybah to the phosphate plant. The police department in Husaybah no longer is functioning.
“I can’t really count the number of Iraqi police stations that have fallen out west in the last three weeks or the number of [Iraqi national guard] compounds. I am getting really tired of no one wanting to or having the will to fight back,” a military official said.
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