7 al-Zarqawi insurgents found slain in retaliation for killing
By John Ward Anderson The Washington Post
BAGHDAD, Iraq — When more than 80 bodies were found last week at four different places in Iraq, a fifth gruesome discovery attracted little notice.
In the violent city of Ramadi, a center of Sunni insurgent activity 60 miles west of Baghdad, the bodies of seven men were found lined up in an unfinished house on the western outskirts of town, according to eyewitnesses.
Unlike the corpses elsewhere, which were mostly Iraqi police and soldiers, the bodies in Ramadi apparently were foreigners, fighters working for Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings, kidnappings and assassinations.
Each of the seven had been shot in the head or torso. The bodies were secretly buried in a local cemetery, the witnesses said.
"My cousins are the ones who killed them," said Jabbar Khalaf Marawi, 42, a former army officer and Communist Party member in Ramadi. Marawi said the slayings were carried out by members of his Dulaimi clan in retaliation for the Oct. 2 killing of a clan leader, Lt. Col. Sulaiman Ahmed Dulaimi, the Iraqi National Guard commander for Ramadi and Fallujah, by al-Zarqawi's group.
Dulaimi and three bodyguards were traveling through Khaldiya, a small town about six miles east of Ramadi, where they were ambushed. The bodyguards were shot and killed on the spot, and Dulaimi was abducted.
His body was found two days later in a youth center on the shores of Lake Tharthar, 20 miles north of Khaldiya. Both his legs were broken in multiple places, his fingernails were removed and he had two bullet wounds in his chest, according to his autopsy report.
A statement by al-Zarqawi's group asserted responsibility for the killing, accusing Dulaimi of being an "agent ... who works for the Americans." It said he had "confessed" to giving U.S. forces valuable information about weak spots in the guerrillas' defenses in the southern part of Fallujah.
Witnesses to the finding of the bodies in the house said they never went to the local police or foreign military forces to report finding the bodies, fearing that they would be accused of complicity in the slayings or that the killers would return to punish them for talking.
"I feared telling the Iraqi army because they would detain me and accuse me of being involved in the killings," said Ali Omar, 32, a motorcycle mechanic who discovered the bodies last Saturday.
Instead, he said he went to Ramadi Hospital and told an emergency-room doctor about his discovery, but the doctor refused to get involved. "He told me, 'Why bring problems on yourself? Leave them until they find them,' " Omar said.
A notice from al-Zarqawi's group was posted on the gate outside a Ramadi mosque this week announcing the death of the seven men and calling their killers "blasphemers, far from the religion of God, who betrayed the mujaheddin after they trusted them." It vowed to find the killers, described as "followers of the occupiers," and behead them.
At the Dulaimi family compound this week in the Abu Marie neighborhood of Ramadi, Sulaiman's father, Hamad Dulaimi, 73, sat on a bench as a group of children played in the yard. The surrounding streets and rooftops were crowded with armed men.
"These are the children of Sulaiman, who was killed by those bastards," he said.
Sulaiman's wife joined him: "Now we can talk, because we got revenge," she said.
"If I didn't know that my son was innocent, I wouldn't have sent his cousins for revenge," the father said. "But for we Arabs, the matter of revenge is like honor. Both are the same for us."
As for al-Zarqawi's promise to retaliate, he said: "We got our revenge, and we have our precautions. Let them do as they like."
