In Iraq

Is the surge working yet? We have turned Iraq into a long-term disaster area:

BAGHDAD - Gunmen in northern Iraq stopped a bus filled with Christians and members of a tiny, mostly Kurdish religious sect on Sunday, police said, separating out the groups and taking 23 of the passengers away to be shot.

The attack came on a violent day in Baghdad, with at least 20 people killed in car bombings, most in a double suicide strike against a police station in a religiously mixed
neighborhood.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, on a tour abroad to ask the Arab world's Sunni-led governments to help his struggling government stop the violence in Iraq, said he told Egypt's president that Iraq's reality is "not a civil or sectarian war."

Police said the execution-style killings of the Yazidis — a primarily Kurdish sect that worships an angel figure considered to be the devil by some Muslims and Christians — appeared to be in response to the stoning death of a Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam.

In the northern Iraq killings, armed men in several cars stopped the bus as it was
carrying workers from the Mosul Textile Factory to their hometown of Bashika, which has a mixed population of Christians and Yazidis.

The gunmen checked passengers' identification, then asked the Christians to get off the bus, said police Brig. Mohammed al-Wagga.

With the Yazidis still inside, the gunmen drove them to eastern Mosul, where they were lined up along a wall and shot to death, al-Wagga said.