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Attack on Iraqi market kills more than 40 people
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Attack on Iraqi market kills more than 40 people
About 40 people were killed in an attack around a crowded market in a violent town just outside Baghdad yesterday, police and Interior ministry sources said.
There were conflicting accounts from officials about the events. In Baghdad, police and ministry sources said a car bomb devastated the market in Mahmudiya, just south of the city.
But in the town itself, a police source said a series of explosions, reported to Reuters by local residents, were mortars falling on the town, followed by a rampage by gunmen through the market – a rare tactic in Iraq against civilian targets.
That source said more than 40 people were killed and 38 wounded. The sources in Baghdad put the toll at 42 dead and 33 wounded.
Some police sources said their forces engaged attackers in a fierce firefight after the explosion. Others said the gunfire was largely intended to disperse crowds. Both Sunni insurgents like al Qaeda and 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.
The attack came on the anniversary of the 1968 coup d’etat that brought Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated Baath party to power.
Mahmudiya is part of a small area dubbed the ‘triangle of death’ over the past three years because of the number of attacks on US forces and among the population.
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 US 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.
Alastair MACDONALD</B>
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<B>British forces detain militia leader in Iraq </B>
British forces have detained the leader of the Shi’ite Mehdi Army in southern Basra province in the latest operation against militia leaders blamed for worsening sectarian violence in the country. The man, identified yesterday by comrades in the Shi’ite group as Sajad Abu Aya, was arrested early on Sunday in a major British military operation involving helicopters and hundreds of troops in which one soldier was killed and another wounded.
“We got the man we wanted,” British military spokesman Major Charlie Burbridge told “Reuters” yesterday, while declining to identify by name two men captured in the town of Garma just north of Basra city, Iraq’s main oil hub. The main suspect was “strongly suspected of involvement in planning and directing terrorist attacks on civilians in Basra, executions, and attacks on coalition forces”, Burbridge said. Security has deteriorated sharply over the past year in Basra, where there is a complex network of criminal gangs and warring Shi’ite militias. Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has declared a state of emergency to crack down on the violence, which threatens oil exports, the backbone of the Iraqi economy. Southern Iraq has been relatively free of the violence gripping other parts of the country, but the region has seen increasing roadside bomb attacks on British troops, who number about 7,000. Britain’s visiting defence minister said in May the violence had reached “unacceptable” levels. A spokesman for the Basra office of radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al Sadr, who controls the Mehdi Army, confirmed Abu Aya had been arrested. He described him as a militia leader, but local residents said he was in overall command in the province. Burbridge said the detained suspect was “believed to have been acting against the wishes of Sadr”.
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