4 men, Sahwa leader gunned down in Salah al-Din

SALAH AL-DIN / IraqiNews.com: Five persons, including a Sahwa (Awakening) council leader, were killed, and three others were wounded in an armed attack on the leader’s house in Salah al-Din province, a police source said on Sunday. “During a late hour on Saturday evening, unknown gunmen attacked the house of Aamer Jassem Khudeir, a leader of Sahwa forces in al-Hudeira al-Sharqiyya village in eastern Balad district, killing five persons, including Khudeir himself, and wounding two women and a child,” the source told IraqiNews.com. The source did not specify whether those attacked belonged to the same family, but noted that all bodies were taken to a local morgue and the wounded to Balad Public Hospital. “The gunmen have fled to an unknown destination after blowing up part of the house,” the source added. Salah al-Din has an area of 24,751 square kilometers (9,556.4 sq mi). The estimated population for 2003 was 2,146,500 people. Located in Central Iraq, north of Baghdad, it is a mainly Sunni province with only two Shiite districts, namely Balad and al-Dujail. Its capital city is Tikrit, the hometown of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. It also includes other important districts like Baiji, north of Tikrit, 175 km north of Baghdad. The province also contains the significantly larger city of Samarra. Before 1976 the province was part of the governorate of Baghdad. It is named after Saladin (written Salah ah Din in modern Arabic), an ethnic Kurd and hero of the 12 th century. Salahuddin province is a variant version of the province’s name. SS (S) 1