Iraqi shoppers, recruits slain

BAGHDAD -- Gunmen bombed and shot families shopping for food and gifts, executed dozens in sectarian killings and ambushed a group of Iraqi police recruits Sunday during the closing hours of Ramadan.

The attacks left scores of Iraqis dead and further marred the Muslim holy month, which has been a time of incessant violence against Iraqis and U.S. troops.

In the religiously mixed province of Diyala, just northeast of the capital, gunmen believed to be Sunni Arab insurgents attacked 300 new police recruits drawn from a Shiite Muslim militia, killing at least 13 of them, and possibly as many as 80, during clashes that began Saturday and continued Sunday.

The recruits, said to be members of a militia called the Al Mahdi army, were to form a new highway police department. But they were greeted with mortar rounds and small-arms fire Saturday when they arrived at their new headquarters near Baqubah, the provincial capital, police and other officials said.

At least 13 of the recruits were killed Sunday in roadside bomb and small-arms attacks. A high-ranking Baqubah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that as many as 67 other recruits were killed Saturday; some of the bodies were rigged with explosives and the devices were later defused by U.S. troops, the official said.

Authorities declared a curfew, fearing revenge attacks by Shiites against Sunnis in the area.

On the outskirts of Baghdad, authorities found the bodies of at least 50 men -- bound and shot execution-style -- scattered in lots and drainage canals.

A suicide bomber detonated an explosives belt in a busy marketplace along the capital’s Palestine Street, killing at least four civilians and injuring 21. The victims were buying groceries in the minutes before the evening breaking of the Ramadan fast, said Lt. Ahmad Qassim of the east Baghdad police division.

Earlier, a bomb placed beneath a car in the downtown Shorja fruit and vegetable market killed at least three civilians and injured eight.

The attacks around the country came as Sunni Muslims marked the beginning of the traditional Eid al-Fitr feast at the end of Ramadan. Shiite Muslims will probably begin the holiday today.

Police in the southern city of Basra found the bodies of four men in scattered locations, all killed with close-range gunshots to the head.

In the town of Musayyib, about 35 miles south of the capital, gunmen in two cars opened fire on civilians in a marketplace, killing one person and dumping his body into a drainage ditch. Police in the town announced the arrest of a group of men allegedly intimidating Shiite families to make them leave the town, which is split between Shiites and Sunnis.

Gunmen opened fire on a group of civilians shopping for groceries in Iskandariya, several miles north of Musayyib, killing one person.

The continued sectarian and insurgent violence in Iraq was a major topic of conversation on television news talk shows Sunday, with both Republican and Democratic members of Congress calling for changes in the Bush administration’s approach to fighting the war and standing up an effective Iraqi government.

“I don’t believe that a shift in tactics ought to wait until after the [U.S.] election” next month, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told CNN’s “Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer.” “There are too many casualties there. If we have a better course, we ought to adopt it sooner rather than later.”

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the leading Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said the administration must push the deeply divided Iraqi political leaders to compromise among themselves on sharing power and oil resources.

“If they don’t want to do that, if they’re going to have a civil war, we have to tell them, ‘You’re going to do that without us,’ ” Levin said on “Fox News Sunday.”

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daragahi@latimes.com

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Special correspondents in Hillah, Iraq; Baghdad; and Baqubah; and near Basra contributed to this report.