Karin Brulliard, The Washington Post, April 22, 2007
BAGHDAD, April 22 — 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 a tiny religious sect called Yazidi.
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 murder was the latest attack on religious minorities in Iraq, where human rights groups say Christians, Jews and members of small 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 into their house as they slept.
But police said Sunday that the Mosul killings appeared to be rooted not just in religious differences, but also in revenge.
Four months ago, the Muslim woman eloped with the Yazidi man, who was from Shikhan, a Yazidi-majority village outside Mosul, said Mohammed Abdul Aziz al-Jabouri, the Mosul deputy police chief. Muslims responded by torching some Yazidi homes in Shikhan, he said.
A few days ago, a Yazidi woman from Beshiqa, another nearby village populated mostly by Yazidis, eloped with a Muslim man and converted to Islam. To punish her, Jabouri said, the woman’s family stoned her to death.