BAGHDAD, July 17: Gunmen killed over 50 people in an attack around a crowded market in a violent town near Baghdad on Monday — one of the bloodiest incidents in Iraq this year.

Officials and residents in Mahmudiya, as well as the U.S. military whose troops were later on the scene, said gunmen, apparently numbering in dozens, 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 defence ministry said two car bombs went off first. Accounts 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 58 dead and over 70 wounded. Shops and cars were left ablaze. State television put the death toll at 70 and showed footage of the burned out remains of vehicles and market stalls along a deserted street.

President Jalal Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, called on religious figures from both Sunni and Shia sects to condemn such violence, which he said aimed to destabilise the country and ‘to create a climate of mistrust among the citizens’.

Both Sunni and Shia militants are active in the area known as the ‘triangle of death’. The attack was on the anniversary of the 1968 coup that brought to power Saddam Hussein’s Baath party.

“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 said: “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 said 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.”

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

Some accused the security forces of failing in their duty.

The U.S. ambassador acknowledged last week that sectarian bloodshed that has pitched Iraq toward all-out civil war was now the main challenge to U.S. 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.

U.S.-led forces have this month arrested several Shia warlords in Baghdad and the south without protest from Shia political leaders, an indication they regard them as rogues.

In Basra, Iraq’s oil-rich second city, members of Sadr’s organisation identified a militant seized by British troops on Sunday as the leader of Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia in the city. —Reuters