Over 40 killed as gunmen savage Baghdad district

BAGHDAD: Shi'ite militia gunmen stormed through a Sunni Muslim district of Baghdad on Sunday, shooting dozens in the city's bloodiest street killings yet, raising new fears Iraq is on the brink of sectarian civil war.   

 

As evening fell two car bombs exploded near a Shi'ite mosque in northeastern Baghdad, killing 17 people and wounding 45, police said. Gunfire rattled across two Sunni neighbourhoods.   

 

In Sunday's rampage, gunmen killed at least 42 people in the western Jihad district, the Interior Ministry said.

 

Many were shot after being pulled from their cars at fake police checkpoints, close to a Shi'ite mosque where a car bomb killed three people on Saturday.   

 

Reuters staff saw four bodies lying on the street, all bound and several blindfolded, a feature of the worsening communal bloodshed.   

 

The violence was a blow to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's national reconciliation plan, which aims to end the bloodletting between his fellow Shi'ites and the once-dominant Sunnis that has pitched Iraq toward all-out urban warfare in recent months.   

 

Police and Sunni politicians blamed rogue police commandos and the Mehdi Army militia of Shi''ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr for Sunday's killings, but officials from Sadr's movement, part of Maliki's Shi'ite Islamist bloc, denied involvement.

 

Police and Interior Ministry sources said Shi'ite gunmen moved through 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,” an Interior Ministry official said.

 

A senior Shi'ite politician said Mehdi Army fighters from eastern Baghdad had moved into Jihad on Sunday but insisted they were only taking on Sunni militants responsible for killing Shi'ites. “There are many terrorist groups in Jihad who are killing Shi'ite families so they went to fight them,” he said.   

 

Iraqi forces imposed a curfew in Jihad after the shootings and President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, appealed for calm.   

 

A Jihad resident reported seeing several dozen people walking through the streets, having evacuated their houses.

 

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 on the streets, they said.   

 

While bombings have often killed dozens, gunmen moving openly through neighbourhoods killing civilians is something seen only rarely in restive areas of mixed population outside Baghdad, and never on this scale in the capital.   

 

Dozens of people are being killed daily in the city in sectarian bloodshed that has surged since the bombing of a major Shi'ite shrine in Samarra on February 22.   

 

A few km from Jihad, Reuters staff in Shula, a mainly Shi'ite island in Sunni west Baghdad, said Mehdi militiamen blocked streets with burning tyres and told residents to stay indoors, apparently fearing reprisal attacks.   

 

Iraqi troops launched a pre-dawn raid on Kadhimiya, a mainly Shi'ite district next to Shula, killing nine militants and capturing seven, the US military said.   

 

The bloodshed followed days of apparently tit-for-tat attacks on Sunni and Shi'ite mosques and operations by U.S.-backed Iraqi troops to capture Shi'ite militia warlords, seen as a threat to Maliki's fledgling national unity coalition.    Maliki has vowed to disband militias -- some tied to parties in his government -- that are carving Baghdad into sectarian no-go areas and accused by Sunnis of running death squads.   

 

But it will be difficult to persuade the militias to give up their guns in the continuing security vacuum and in the absence of a strong military or police force.   

 

“These killings reveal the helplessness of the government in disbanding the militias,” said Adnan al-Dulaimi, a leader of the main Sunni political bloc boycotting parliament over the kidnapping of a Sunni lawmaker.

 

Shi'ite militias were blamed.   

 

Iraqis of all denominations have, however, been united in condemning American soldiers involved in a rape and murder case that has provoked calls for a US withdrawal.   

 

One of a handful of serious crimes laid at US troops' door in recent weeks, four soldiers were charged with rape and murder bringing to five the number of Americans alleged to have attacked a teenager and her family in March near Baghdad.