By Xinhua
Tikrit, Iraq : Six fighters affiliated to anti-Qaida Awakening Council groups were gunned down by unknown gunmen in Salahudin province, a provincial police source said on Tuesday.
“Gunmen in a convoy of vehicles approached on Monday evening a checkpoint manned by local Awakening Council fighters in an area near the al-Tharthar Lake and opened fire, killing six fighters,” Col. Hasan Ahmed from the provincial police command told Xinhua.
The gunmen were pretending as they were in a wedding procession in order to approach closer to the checkpoint, Ahmed said.
The area where the incident took place located between Salahudin and Anbar provinces, which has long been a stronghold of the al-Qaida in Iraq network despite many offensives launched by U.S. and Iraqi security forces to clear the vast open area, he added.
The Awakening Councils are armed groups of local neighborhoods, including some powerful anti-U.S. Sunni insurgent groups who have turned their rifles toward the al-Qaida network after the latter adopted a hard line Islam and exercised indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.