Iraq: Shia militia gunmen stormed through a Sunni Arab district in Baghdad yesterday, shooting dozens in the city's bloodiest street-killings yet and raising new fears Iraq is on the brink of sectarian civil war.
As evening fell, two car bombs exploded near a Shia mosque in northeastern Baghdad, killing 19 people and wounding 45, police said. Gunfire rattled across two Sunni neighbourhoods.
Gunmen killed at least 42 people in the western Jihad district, the interior ministry said, in a rampage likely to fuel calls for prime minister Nuri al-Maliki to tackle the militias, blamed for much of the sectarian violence.
Many of the victims were killed after being pulled from their cars at fake police checkpoints, close to a Shia mosque where a car bomb killed three people on Saturday.
The violence was a blow to Mr al-Maliki's national reconciliation plan, which aims to end the bloodletting between his fellow Shias and the once-dominant Sunnis that has pitched Iraq toward all-out urban warfare.
Police and Sunni politicians blamed rogue police commandos and the Mehdi army militia of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr for yesterday's killings, but officials from al-Sadr's movement, part of Mr al-Maliki's Shia Islamist bloc, denied any involvement.
Police and interior ministry sources said Shia gunmen moved through the Jihad district, checking people's identity papers for typically Sunni names. One said Sunni men had been herded into side-streets and gunned down. "Gunmen are killing Sunni civilians according to their identity cards," said an interior ministry official.
A senior Shia politician said Mehdi army fighters from eastern Baghdad had moved into Jihad yesterday but insisted they were only taking on Sunni militants responsible for killing Shias.
"There are many terrorist groups in Jihad who are killing Shia families so they went to fight them," he said.
Iraqi forces imposed a curfew in Jihad after the shootings and President Jalal Talabani, who is a Kurd, issued an appeal for unity.
Medical staff at west Baghdad's main hospital said they had received 29 bodies from Jihad, overwhelming their morgue. There were reports of more bodies lying in the streets.
Gunmen moving openly through neighbourhoods killing civilians is seen rarely in restive areas of mixed sectarian and ethnic groups outside Baghdad - and never on this scale in the capital. Al-Sadr, whose supporters have waged two rebellions against US forces in Iraq, blamed the violence on a "Western plan aimed at sponsoring a civil and sectarian war between brothers".
A few kilometres from Jihad, a mainly Shia enclave in Sunni west Baghdad, there were reports that Mehdi militiamen blocked streets with burning tyres and told residents to stay indoors, fearing reprisal attacks.
Iraqi troops launched a pre-dawn raid on Kadhimiya, a mainly Shia district next to Shula, killing nine militants and capturing seven, the US military said.
The bloodshed followed days of tit-for-tat attacks on Sunni and Shia mosques and operations by US-backed Iraqi troops to capture Shia militia warlords seen as a threat to Mr al-Maliki's fledgling national unity coalition.
Mr al-Maliki has vowed to disband militias - some tied to parties in his government - that are carving Baghdad into sectarian no-go areas and are accused by Sunnis of running death-squads.
Iraqis of all denominations have condemned American soldiers involved in a rape and murder case that has provoked calls for a US withdrawal. Five soldiers are alleged to have attacked a teenager and her family in March near Baghdad.