IRAQ: Gunmen killed more than 50 people in an attack around a crowded market in a town near Baghdad yesterday in one of the bloodiest incidents in Iraq this year.
Officials and residents in Mahmudiya, as well as the US military whose troops were later on the scene, said gunmen, apparently in dozens, stormed the market in the religiously mixed town after a barrage of mortars and grenades. It was a rare form of attack against civilians, car bombings are more common.
The defence ministry said two car bombs went off first. Accounts from the scene stressed that the main attack was from gunmen on foot, tossing grenades and firing on people.
The local hospital said it took in 58 dead and more than 70 wounded. Shops and cars were left ablaze. State television put the death toll at 70 and showed footage of the burned out remains of vehicles and market stalls along a deserted street.
President Jalal Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, called on clerics from both Sunni and Shia Muslim sects to condemn such violence, which he said aimed to destabilise the country and "to create a climate of mistrust among the citizens".
The mayor said the gunmen poured out of a Shia suburb into the centre. The head of the local council called them Sunni rebels who attacked a Shia family in the suburb before fanning out into the town.
Both Sunni and Shia militants are active in an area known as the "triangle of death". The attack was on the anniversary of the 1968 coup that brought to power Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led Baath party, which oppressed Iraq's Shia Muslim majority.
Sunni rebels, including al-Qaeda Islamists, are believed to have discreet bases in the palm groves on Baghdad's fringes, from where they have conducted attacks on Shia settlements as well as regularly attacking US troops in the area.
"It was a well-planned Saddamist plot," Mahmudiya council chief Abu Ali al-Masoudi told Iraqiya television. "They burned shops and the market and killed people who were eating their breakfast in restaurants and cafés and people going to work."
Mahmudiya's mayor Muayyad Fadhil told Reuters: "There was a mortar attack. Then gunmen came from the eastern side of the town. They came into the market and opened fire at random on the people shopping." He said the east of town was mostly Shia.
Local residents said they had heard a series of explosions later punctuated by heavy gunfire. The town, in the news lately because of a rape-murder investigation against US troops, was sealed off for a time by police roadblocks.
Members of parliament from the Shia Islamist faction led by militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr quit yesterday's session, saying the incident was an ambush against a Shia funeral convoy heading between the capital and a traditional cemetery at Najaf.
Some accused the security forces of failing in their duty.