20 Police Killed in Western Iraq

At least 20 police officers were gunned down in western Iraq early on Monday by dozens of gunmen masquerading as black-clad SWAT teams out to make a high-level arrest, local security officials said. The killings occurred in the heavily Sunni Muslim city of Haditha and were the latest in a long militant campaign to infiltrate, undercut and batter Iraq’s military and police forces. They came about 10 days after suicide bombers and gunmen killed dozens of people at police checkpoints across Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq. Around 2 a.m. on Monday, 40 gunmen dressed in police uniforms rolled into Haditha in six trucks painted like black emergency police vehicles. To slip through the checkpoints on the city’s edge, the gunmen said they had arrest warrants for criminal suspects, Haditha’s police chief said. They flashed police identification cards and their vehicles even had police license plates, security officials said. It was unclear whether Iraqi police were complicit in the plot or had simply been duped. Dozens of shops across Baghdad sell security uniforms, rank and unit insignias, holsters and other gear that make it easy for militants to disguise themselves as police officers. Once inside Haditha, the assailants drove to the homes of three police officers and shot them. One of the slain officers was Col. Mohammed Shafar, a former leader of the Awakening movement, an American-backed group of Sunni militias that switched sides to fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq, helping to blunt some of the war’s worst violence. After killing Colonel Shafar and the two other officers, the gunmen split up to escape. Gun battles erupted when they were confronted while trying to leave the city and they sprayed checkpoints with automatic weapons fire and lobbed hand grenades at police. Three police officers were also wounded in the attacks, local health officials said. At least one gunman was killed, but nearly all of them escaped and were last seen driving north, security officials said. Local police said they had seized two of the assailants’ vehicles and found books and other materials suggesting they were connected to Al Qaeda in Iraq, an insurgent group composed largely of Sunni Iraqis. Al Qaeda in Iraq did not claim responsibility for the attack but posts on its online message board hailed the bloodshed as a great victory. It was unclear why they chose Haditha, a farming town that was a stronghold of Sunni insurgents. The city became notorious in Iraq as the site of a 2005 massacre of Iraqi civilians at the hands of United States Marines. Yasir Ghazi contributed reporting from Baghdad and Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed from Anbar Province.