Reuters

Posted: 4:00 am
October 10, 2008

BAGHDAD - The leader of a US-backed neighborhood police unit was killed, along with his wife and two children, by a roadside bomb yesterday, authorities said.

The explosion in Udhaim, 60 miles north of Baghdad, took the lives of Khdaier Abbas Azzawi, his wife, daughter and son, and wounded eight women, all relatives traveling in the same minibus.

Azzawi co-led a local Awakening Council, one of the neighborhood guard units that man checkpoints and provide security across Iraq. The councils, hailed by the United States as partially responsible for the recent decline in violence, began in 2006 in the western Anbar province when Sunnis, fed up with al Qaeda violence, formed their own patrols.

Anbar’s success gave rise to similar groups across Iraq, all of them funded by the United States.

The Iraqi government assumed control of the Baghdad units this month and expects to do the same in other areas in the future.

But some within Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shiite-led government see the largely Sunni groups, comprising many former insurgents, as threats, and many Awakening members have been targeted for arrest or attack in recent months.

Copyright Reuters.
Click For Restrictions