47 Sunni militants die in Iraq gunfights

BAGHDAD, Iraq — At least 47 Sunni Arab insurgents were killed Saturday during long gun battles with Iraqi security forces in and around Baqouba, the capital of Diyala Province, a police spokesman in Baqouba said.

In the largest and deadliest fight, scores of insurgents, using assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, laid siege to several government buildings in the center of the city, according to the spokesman. At least 36 of the Sunni Arab insurgents were killed in that clash, which raged for about four hours, according to the official, who said he did not yet know if any Iraqi security forces had been wounded.

Gun battles also broke out in Buhruz, a predominantly Sunni village just south of Baqouba, when gunmen assaulted the main police station from three directions using mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles, the police spokesman in Baqouba reported.

After nightfall, clashes broke out between gunmen and Iraqi army troops in the Al Tahrir neighborhood in Baqouba, according to the police spokesman there. At least 11 insurgents were killed in the fighting, he said.

An American military spokeswoman in Baghdad also said there had been an attack in Buhruz, but had no details, and she was unable to confirm the Iraqi accounts of other gun battles.

Diyala has been an increasingly bloody battleground between Sunni and Shiite death squads vying for sectarian domination. American officials have accused the province's police and military forces of siding with the Shiite militias.

The police in Baladruz, a rural village in Diyala, recovered the bullet-ridden corpses of 21 men who had been dragged from their homes by gunmen wearing Iraqi military uniforms and then abducted in pickup trucks, the Diyala police spokesman said. The men, all farmers, were from two extended Shiite families and were taken Friday evening from two neighboring houses in Baladruz, about 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, the police spokesman said. The motive for the attack remained unclear.

The United Nations' special representative for Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, urged the Iraqi government on Saturday to stop the "cancer" of sectarianism from destroying the country and warned that a retributive cycle of violent revenge was "tearing apart the very political and social fabric of Iraq."

"No country could tolerate such a cancer in its body politic," Qazi said in a statement.

Relatively little violence was reported in Baghdad on Saturday amid a curfew that was imposed here on Thursday after car bombings that killed more than 200 people.