More than 40 killed as gunmen storm Baghdad area [video report]

A bomb attack outside the al-Zahra Shi'ite mosque killed three people and wounded 19. Picture / Reuters

BAGHDAD - Shi'ite militiamen stormed through a Sunni Arab district of Baghdad on Sunday local time, shooting dozens in the city's bloodiest street killings yet and 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 19 people and wounding 59, police said. Gunfire rattled across two Sunni neighbourhoods.

Gunmen killed at least 42 people in the western Jihad district, Interior Ministry sources said, in a rampage likely to fuel calls for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to tackle powerful militias, blamed for much of the sectarian violence.

Many of the victims were killed 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 in one street, all shot and bound and several blindfolded, a feature of the worsening communal bloodshed that has gripped Iraq since the bombing of a revered Shi'ite mosque on February 22.

The violence was a blow to 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 any 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 told Reuters.

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 unity.

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 in the streets, they said.

The Interior Ministry's press office and the US military said only 12 bodies had been found.

Sadr, whose supporters have waged two rebellions against US forces in Iraq, blamed Sunday's violence on a "Western plan aimed at sponsoring a civil and sectarian war between brothers".

A few kilometres from Jihad, Reuters staff in Shula, a mainly Shi'ite enclave 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 US-backed Iraqi troops to capture Shi'ite militia warlords, seen as a threat to Maliki's fledgling national unity coalition.

- REUTERS