Many of those murdered in the sectarian violence were unarmed victims.
Many of those murdered in the sectarian violence were unarmed victims.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Heavily armed insurgents launched a frontal assault Wednesday on a police station near Baghdad, killing a battalion commander and three of his men in the second such large-scale operation in two days.
Meanwhile, separate rebel attacks on two vehicles in the capital killed 15 pilgrims coming home from the southern holy city of Karbala -- the deadliest episode of this week's annual mourning period observed by millions of Shiite Muslims.
The bloodshed demonstrated Iraq's continuing insurgent threat on multiple fronts. In the month since they blew up the Golden Mosque, a Shiite shrine in Samarra, Sunni Arab insurgents have been locked with Shiite militias in an escalating communal conflict that has led to the murder of hundreds of Iraqis of both sects, many of them unarmed victims ambushed on the road or dragged from their homes in the night.
Wednesday's toll also included 11 men whose bodies turned up in various parts of Baghdad, some of them blindfolded and bearing signs of torture.
Daring attacks
Amid the violence, the insurgents have staged daring attacks on Iraqi government and U.S. targets.
The latest was Wednesday's predawn raid on the police facility in Madain, 15 miles southeast of the capital, by dozens of insurgents whose exact number was unclear because of darkness.
The city is at the northern tip of the so-called triangle of death, a mostly Sunni region rife with sectarian violence.
The attack there was slightly smaller in scale than the dawn raid on a judicial and police compound in Muqdadiyah, 60 miles northeast of Baghdad, in which at least 17 policemen and guards were killed and 33 prisoners freed Tuesday.
Emerging from a nearby palm grove, the attackers in Madain fired 14 mortars into the compound, which houses the city hall and a police battalion, triggering a two-hour firefight that lasted until daybreak, the Interior Ministry said.
The insurgents also fired rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles but failed to overrun the compound.
In addition to the four killed, five additional police were wounded.
There was no indication of insurgent casualties.
Later police raided homes in the area, detaining 76 men for questioning, the ministry said. One was identified as a Syrian who was carrying insurgent leaflets.
Iraqi police and soldiers have been stretched thin guarding the estimated 2 million black-clad pilgrims who walked to and from Karbala this week to mark the 40th and final day of the annual mourning period for Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Mohammed.
Insurgents fired machine guns into a bus taking pilgrims home through Baghdad's Sunni-dominated Amiriya neighborhood Wednesday, killing 14 and wounding 18, police said. Two policemen died in a shootout with the assailants.
One pilgrim was killed and 22 others wounded in a later insurgent attack on a pickup truck in the capital's Adil neighborhood, police said.
At least five other Iraqis were reported killed Wednesday, including the interpreter for two British soldiers whose foot patrol was hit by a roadside bomb blast in the southern city of Basra. Both soldiers were wounded.
Dog handler's sentence
Also Wednesday, military jurors sentenced an Army dog handler to less than six months behind bars for using his Belgian shepherd to intimidate detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, one of the lightest sentences so far for a soldier implicated in the notorious abuse.
Sgt. Michael J. Smith, 24, was ordered to serve 179 days in confinement and to forfeit $2,250 in pay for convictions on five criminal counts, including maltreatment of detainees, dereliction of duty and an indecent act.
Smith also will be reduced to the rank of private, E-1, and will receive a bad-conduct discharge at the end of his prison term, according to an Army spokeswoman at Fort Meade, Md., where the court-martial ended Wednesday.
The jury could have sent Smith to prison for as long as 81/2 years.
The sentence was the lightest given to any of the four military police soldiers who have gone to trial, rather than entered guilty pleas, for abuse at Abu Ghraib.
The jury of four officers and three senior noncommissioned officers decided Smith's use of his military working dog was out of bounds but not especially egregious, acquitting him on half of the original charges.
Smith was also the first soldier to have had the benefit of a senior officer testifying, with Col. Thomas Pappas taking some responsibility for ordering the use of dogs in interrogations in late 2003 without clearly defining rules for the aggressive tactic.
Former Corp. Charles Graner Jr. received the longest sentence, 10 years, for abuse at Abu Ghraib that included piling naked detainees into a pyramid, and former Private First Class Lynndie England was sentenced to three years in prison for her role. They were both denied the opportunity to call senior officials from the prison in their defense.
Former specialist Sabrina Harman also received six months after being found guilty at trial.