Gunmen shoot and kill more than 40 unarmed Iraqi Sunnis in western Baghdad after checking their ID cards, Iraqi police tell

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Gunmen roaming a Baghdad neighborhood on Sunday killed at least 42 unarmed Iraqis as soon as they identified them as Sunnis, emergency police said.

Ala'a Makki, a spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party -- Iraq's main Sunni political movement -- said the victims included women and children.

He called the killings in Hay al Jihad "one of the biggest massacres of Sunnis."

Later Sunday, two car bombs detonated simultaneously at a market in Baghdad's Karsa neighborhood, killing at least 19 and wounding 59, police said.

The market is close to the Tammimi Hussainiye, a Shiite prayer site.

In the Hay al Jihad rampage, gunmen -- mostly "young reckless teenagers" -- started to pick up Sunni youth and execute them in public, while others went door-to-door looking for Sunni families who stayed behind, Makki said.

After warning one Iraqi woman she had 10 seconds to leave, the gunmen killed her and her children, Makki said.

A member of the Iraqi Islamic Party was dragged out of his house at 7 a.m. and executed, he said.

A witness in the Hay al Jihad neighborhood said he walked outside his home and saw the main street lined with bodies, and the attackers setting fire to homes.

He said residents tried to call the Ministries of Interior and Defense, without success.

Makki blamed the Mehdi militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

The violence continued for eight hours, Makki said, blaming the Ministries of Interior and Defense for not responding, and saying U.S. forces responded too late to stop most of the killings.

Wissam Mohammad Hussein al-Ani, a 27-year-old Sunni calligrapher, told The Associated Press three gunmen stopped him as he walked toward the bus and asked him to produce his identification. They let him go after he produced a fake ID with a Shiite name but seized two young men standing nearby.

The Shiite owner of a supermarket in the area said he saw heavily armed men pull four people out of a car, blindfold them and force them to stand to the side while they grabbed five others out of a minivan, the AP reported.

"After ten minutes, the gunmen took the nine people to a place few meters away from the market and opened fire on them," Saad Jawad Kadhim al-Azzawi told the AP. "When I heard the gunfire, I closed my supermarket and went home."

Violence follows attacks on Shiite, Sunni sites >>>cont
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