Military-Style Assault Kills Dozens in Iraqi Marketplace

A relative mourns one of those who died in an attack by masked gunmen in Mahmudiyah. (By Alaa Al-marjani -- Associated Press)

"They were throwing grenades into shops, burning the cars," Shakir recalled, as vehicles arriving at the hospital brought the corpses of four Shiites killed in a separate assault just west of Baghdad.

The attackers in Mahmudiyah turned rocket-propelled grenades and automatic and semiautomatic weapons upon shoppers along the thick rows of wooden stalls and cramped shops, witnesses said. Many of those hit were women and children.

"People started falling down, wounded," said Kamal Hussein, a 46-year-old man shopping at the time of the attack. "People started to run, with none stopping to look behind them."

Fatima Khadhim Ali, a spice seller, was shot in the head and chest. She collapsed, miscarrying in her fourth month of pregnancy, brother Ali Khadhim Ali said by her hospital bed in Baghdad. Her husband had died next to her in their tiny market stall.

As the attack continued, a few men emerged from nearby houses with guns to fight off the attackers, witnesses said. The assailants turned on one man who came out of his house armed, shooting him dead and then storming his house to kill everyone inside, said Zahad, the policeman.

Survivors said Iraqi soldiers let the heavily armed, highly visible attackers pass through a checkpoint near the marketplace. Witnesses described Iraqi security forces largely leaving the civilians to their fate, although survivors gave conflicting accounts as to whether Iraqi police, soldiers or Shiite militiamen had tried to fight off the attackers.

Iraqi survivors also condemned U.S. forces, saying they watched the attack from their posts but did nothing until the killing stopped. American troops reported hearing detonations and gunfire, the U.S. command said, but added that Iraqi troops are responsible for security in Mahmudiyah and that American soldiers there do not intervene unless asked by the Iraqis.

After the attack, Iraqi soldiers asked U.S. forces to patrol with them Monday night, as the city's people took to their houses for what many feared would be further retaliation, said Mayor Mouyad Fadhil Saif.

As day turned into evening, families with coffins of Mahmudiyah's dead strapped to their car roofs streamed south to Najaf, a holy city for Shiites. Wailing, the mother and sisters of one policeman slain in Mahmudiyah ran behind his coffin, beating their heads with their fists and smearing dirt onto their clothes in traditional mourning.

Coffins -- typically borrowed from mosques and returned after the dead inside are buried in shrouds -- accumulated five to 10 at a time outside a graveyard building where corpses are ritually washed before burial.

In statements, Sunni insurgents gave different explanations for why Mahmudiyah was targeted -- some saying that it was because Sadr's Mahdi Army militia had allegedly driven Sunni vendors from the market a week ago, others saying it was because of the recent killing of a Sunni cleric. A written statement in the name of the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq said the attack targeted local leaders of the Mahdi Army.

The massacre in Mahmudiyah -- following the one in Baghdad's al-Jihad neighborhood -- marked another full-scale, daylight military-style assaults on civilians, raising the specter of direct clashes between Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.