Mixed marriage massacre

"The bad blood began to rise a few months ago in northern Iraq with the kind of interfaith love so reviled by Iraq's religious extremists: A Muslim woman eloped with a member of the tiny Yazidi religious sect.
It erupted in a massacre Sunday, police said, when Sunni gunmen in Mosul hijacked a busload of mostly Yazidi workers from a nearby town and shot and killed 23 of them, one by one.
The mass killing was the latest attack on religious minorities in Iraq, where human rights groups say Christians, Jews and members of other, smaller sects are often killed, persecuted or forced to convert by Muslim extremists. Last month in Kirkuk, two elderly Chaldean Catholic nuns were killed by armed men who stormed their house as they slept.
. . . 'They don't know the language of negotiation,' he said of the killers, who he said were probably members of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. 'They only know the language of weapons.' "

source
Brulliard, Karin. (The Washington Post). An Iraqi Massacre Rooted in Interfaith Love. April 23, 2007.

related posting
Mixed marriages targeted: Is mixed region a solution? March 6, 2007.

posted: wednesday, april 25, 2007, 4:37 PM ET

tags: iraq yazidi mixed marriage