BAGHDAD, 18 July 2006 — Gunmen killed over 50 people in an attack around a crowded market in a violent town near Baghdad yesterday, one of the bloodiest incidents in Iraq this year.
Local officials and residents in Mahmudiya, as well as the US military whose troops were later on the scene, said a large number of gunmen 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 Iraqi Defense Ministry insisted, despite denials from other agencies, that two car bombs killed 42 people and an Interior Ministry official said one car bomb went off.
But accounts direct from the scene stressed the main attack was from gunmen on foot, tossing grenades and firing on people.
The local hospital said it took in 56 dead bodies and 67 wounded. Shops, homes and cars were left ablaze, residents said.
President Jalal Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, called on clerics from both Sunni and Shiite Muslim sects to condemn such violence, which he said aimed to destabilize the country and “to create a climate of mistrust among the citizens.”
The identity of the attackers was unclear. The mayor said the gunmen poured out of a Shiite suburb into the center. The head of the local council called them Sunni rebels who attacked a Shiite family in the suburb before fanning out into the town.
Both Sunni and Shiite 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 Shiite majority.
Violence by Shiite militias, more or less loyal to factions in the two-month-old unity government, has come to rival that of Sunni insurgents, both Baathists and Al-Qaeda Islamists, who have fought the new, US-backed rulers in Baghdad since 2003.
The US ambassador acknowledged last week that sectarian bloodshed that has pitched Iraq toward all-out civil war was now the main challenge to US hopes for Iraq. Iraqi officials and diplomats in Baghdad fear the country could slide deeper into general anarchy if myriad armed groups cannot be controlled.
“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 cafes 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 Shiite.
Local residents told Reuters 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.
