SAMARRA
Heavily-armed terrorists attacked the home of an anti-Qaeda militiaman north of Baghdad on Sunday, killing and decapitating his wife and two sons and killing another person in a brutal pre-dawn assault.
The militia leader, Abu Salim, was not in the house at the time of the attack, which involved more than a dozen vehicles and fighters armed with heavy machine guns and other weapons and also left two of his young sons wounded.
Fighters attacked the militia leader’s house in Jilam, a suburb of the predominantly Sunni city of Samarra, at around midnight on Saturday, and killed Abu Salim’s wife, two sons and another woman, a police colonel and another officer said.
They then decapitated his wife and two sons, and set off explosives around the house, injuring two other sons, aged four and five.
Policemen at a nearby checkpoint attempted to repel the assault, the officers said, but were unsuccessful and fled the scene when they ran out of ammunition and reinforcements that they had radioed for failed to arrive.
Abu Salim is Jilam leader of the Sahwa, or Awakening, a collection of mostly-Sunni tribal militias that from late-2006 onwards sided with US forces against their co-religionists in Al-Qaeda, helping turn the tide of Iraq’s insurgency.
