Gunmen killed 11 electricity plant workers in northern Iraq today after stopping their vehicle and machine-gunning them as they sat inside, Iraqi police and army officials said.
Police also said 18 goat herders from an extended Shia family were kidnapped yesterday near the holy Shia city of Kerbala, 110 kilometres southwest of Baghdad. It was the second mass kidnapping in a week.
On Sunday, 19 men from a Shia village were kidnapped by gunmen at a fake checkpoint north of Baghdad. Their bodies were found on Monday.
Iraqi and US military commanders have warned that militants are shifting the focus of their attacks to outside Baghdad, where thousands of US and Iraqi troops have taken to the streets to crack down on sectarian bloodletting.
Police said gunmen ambushed the vehicle carrying power plant workers in a mainly Sunni area near Hawija, southwest of the northern city of Kirkuk.
"Gunmen took advantage of the fact there were no police or army patrols. They stopped the vehicle, sprayed it with gunfire and then fled," said an Iraqi army spokesman.
It was not clear whether the attack was linked to an ambush in the same area on Saturday, when gunmen shot dead eight civilian employees of an Iraqi military base. Four brothers were among the dead in that incident.
Police in Nikhaib, west of Kerbala, said gunmen in four or five vehicles kidnapped the 18 goat herders, including two teenage girls, and then drove off in the direction of Anbar province, heartland of the Sunni insurgency.
"All of us face a savage and determined enemy," U.S military spokesman Major-General William Caldwell told a news briefing in Baghdad, blaming al-Qaeda for "trying to ignite a cycle of tit-for-tat violence".