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Fallujah city council leader killed; 4th in 14 months to die in the job BAGHDAD - The Fallujah city council chairman, a critic of al-Qaida who took the job after his three predecessors were assassinated, was killed on Saturday, the latest blow in a violent internal Sunni struggle for control of an insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad. Sami Abdul-Amir al-Jumaili was gunned down by attackers in a passing car as he was walking outside his home in central Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, according to police. In the capital, U.S. and Iraqi officials defended plans to build a barrier around a Sunni enclave to protect its inhabitants from surrounding Shiite areas, while residents expressed concern it would isolate the community. Abdul-Amir's assassination came a month after he agreed to take the dangerous job - the only person willing to do so - with promises to improve services and work with the Americans to ease traffic-clogging checkpoints in the city. The 65-year-old Sunni sheik was the fourth city council chairman to be killed in 14 months as insurgents target fellow Sunnis willing to cooperate with the United States. Abdul-Amir's predecessor, Abbas Ali Hussein, was shot down Feb. 2. Both men were strong critics of al-Qaida in Iraq, which is battling a growing number of Sunni tribes that have turned against it in the vast Anbar province, a center for anti-U.S. guerrillas since the 2004 uprising in Fallujah. U.S. officials say tribal leaders and even some insurgents are increasingly repelled by the group's brutality and religious extremism. The U.S. military confirmed the killing, and provincial officials condemned it. "He was one of the many good people of the province who worked to help the city of Fallujah rebuild and regain life," the provincial government said in a statement. "This murder was a crime against all of the citizens of Iraq." Gunmen broke into the home of Najim Abdullah Suod, the city council chief who preceded Hussein, killing the lawyer and his 23-year-old son on Sept. 24, 2006, while Sheik Kamal Nazal, a cleric, was gunned down as he walked to work on Feb. 7, 2006. The U.S. military has said that the wall in Baghdad was meant to secure the minority Sunni community of Azamiyah, which "has been trapped in a spiral of sectarian violence and retaliation." |