Decapitated Iraqi soldiers found in Mosul
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-11-21 09:13

The bodies of nine Iraqi soldiers, all shot execution-style and seven of them decapitated, were discovered in the northern city of Mosul on Saturday, the U.S. military said.

The discovery came on top of four beheaded bodies that the U.S. military reported on Saturday that troops had found several days earlier. Those four bodies were still being identified.

Iraqi children watch a U.S. Army soldier patrolling for insurgent activity in a village on the outskirts of Mosul, Iraq, Saturday, Nov. 20, 2004. American and Iraqi forces detained 30 suspected guerrillas overnight in Mosul, the U.S. military said Saturday. [AP]

U.S. forces found the nine soldiers' bodies off a main road about a mile from the Tigris River after getting a tip from the Iraqi National Guard, said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings of Task Force Olympia.

The men, who were not in uniform, have been identified as members of the Iraqi regular army based at the al-Kisik military base about 30 miles west of Mosul, near Tal Afar, he said.

All nine had been shot in the back of the head, and seven of them were decapitated, Hastings said.

Mosul, Iraq's third largest city with around 1 million people 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, has been a focus of violence the past week. U.S. and Iraqi troops began a major military operation Tuesday after insurgents launched an uprising, taking control of some parts of Mosul and storming police stations.

The four other bodies were found Thursday. Three of the bodies were found by the roadside in a northeastern neighborhood of Mosul, while the fourth was discovered in the southwestern part of the city, Hastings said.

On Friday, a statement posted on an Islamist Web site in the name of Jordanian terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group said it had "slaughtered" two Iraqi National Guard officers "in the presence of a big crowd" in Mosul. The claim included no photos or video and could not be verified.

There was no way of saying whether the bodies had been decapitated in a public manner, as the web site claimed, said Hastings, adding that U.S. troops were "not able to identify them and say whether they were bodies of Iraqi National Guard, police or just anybody."

An extremist group, the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, announced in Web statement Saturday that it kidnapped and killed two members of a Kurdish political group in Mosul. It posted a video showing two men being shot. The men wore robes with the initials of their group, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, on them.

The claim's authenticity could not be verified, and it was not immediately known if there was any connection to any of the bodies found.

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