Gunmen in northern Iraq stopped a bus filled with Christians and members of a tiny, mostly Kurdish religious sect on Sunday, police said, separating out the groups and taking 23 of the passengers away to be shot.The attack came on a violent day in Baghdad, with at least 20 people killed in car bombings, most in a double suicide strike against a police station in a religiously mixed neighborhood.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, on a tour abroad to ask the Arab world's Sunni-led governments to help his struggling government stop the violence in Iraq, said he told Egypt's president that Iraq's reality is "not a civil or sectarian war."
Police said the execution-style killings of the Yazidis — a primarily Kurdish sect that worships an angel figure considered to be the devil by some Muslims and Christians — appeared to be in response to the stoning death of a Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam.
Read More
