Attack in town near Baghdad kills dozens: police

By Alastair Macdonald

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Dozens of people were killed in an
attack around a crowded market in a violent town just outside
Baghdad on Monday, one of the bloodiest incidents in Iraq this
year, police and government officials said.

Amid conflicting accounts, U.S. troops, police and the
mayor in Mahmudiya said gunmen stormed the area amid grenade or
mortar explosions in a rare form of assault on civilians in
Iraq. The hospital put the death toll at 56, with another 67
wounded.

But the Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman, insisting only 42
had died, said it was the result of a double car bombing, a
more common form of attack against civilians in an area dubbed
the ‘triangle of death’ for the level of Sunni-Shi’ite
violence.

The identity of the attackers was not clear although the
mayor of Mahmudiya, Muayyad Fadhil, accused gunmen of pouring
out of a mainly Shi’ite suburb of the religiously mixed town
south of the capital and then firing at random on shoppers in
the crowded market after a mortar barrage on the same area.

Fadhil, who calls himself a Shi’ite independent politician,
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.”

Local residents also 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
U.S. troops, was sealed off for a time by police roadblocks.

The U.S. military, in a statement that said 40 people were
killed and 90 wounded, added: “Terrorists stormed a market near
the Mohammed al-Amin mosque in Mahmudiya … Witnesses (said)
there had been a large number of terrorists throwing grenades.”

Iraqi and U.S. soldiers came under fire and reported at
least eight explosions, which bomb disposal experts said had
been caused by grenades, the U.S. military said.

Local police commander Colonel Iyad Mohammed also said
mortars hit the town before the gunmen attacked. He said 55
people were killed. No official confirmed a death toll of 70
given by Iraqiya state television.

Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Abdul Aziz
Mohammed criticized media reports as exaggerated and insisted
that only 42 had died in two car bombs.

PARLIAMENT

Members of parliament from the Shi’ite Islamist faction led
by militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr quit Monday’s session,
saying the incident was an ambush against a Shi’ite funeral
convoy heading between the capital and a traditional cemetery
at Najaf.

Some accused the security forces of failing in their duty.

The attack came on the anniversary of the 1968 coup that
brought Saddam Hussein’s Baath party to power. Dominated by the
Sunni minority, the party oppressed Shi’ites for 35 years.

While car bombings of markets are commonplace in Iraq,
large-scale gun and grenade attacks on civilians are a rare
tactic, although 40 people were killed a week ago when gunmen
rampaged through a mainly Sunni district in Baghdad.

Such coordinated infantry-style assaults have generally
been restricted to attacks on the Iraqi security forces.

Sunni insurgents like al Qaeda and Baathist diehards as
well as Shi’ite militias have been active in the area, where
the population is mixed between the two Muslim sects whose
violent differences have taken Iraq to the brink of civil war.

On Sunday, a suicide bomber killed 25 people in a cafe
north of Baghdad and the head of the North Oil Company was
kidnapped, the second high-profile abduction in two days in the
city after Iraq’s Olympics chief was snatched on Saturday.

Six Americans have been charged over the alleged rape and
murder of a 14-year-old girl in Mahmudiya in March and the
killing of her parents and 6-year-old sister in their home.

Nearby, three U.S. troops from the same unit were killed in
an attack on an isolated checkpoint last month. Two of them
were abducted before being killed. An al Qaeda-led group has
claimed the attack was in revenge for the rape and murders.

(Additional reporting by Aseel Kami, Sami al-Jumaili and
Ross Colvin)