BAGHDAD: Iraqi Shia militiamen opened fire on minority Sunni Muslims in a village mosque on Friday, killing dozens just as Baghdad is trying to build a cross-community government to fight Sunni militants whose rise has alarmed Western powers.



A morgue official in Diyala province north of Baghdad said 68 people had been killed in the sectarian attack staged on the Muslim day of prayer. Ambulances took the bodies 60 km (40 miles) to the provincial capital of Baquba, where Iranian-trained Shia militias are powerful and act with impunity.



Attacks on mosques are acutely sensitive and have in the past unleashed a deadly series of revenge killings and counter attacks in Iraq, where violence has returned to the levels of 2006-2007, the peak of a sectarian civil war. Lawmaker Nahida al-Dayani, who is from Diyala, said about 150 worshippers were at Imam Wais mosque when the militiamen arrived following a roadside bombing which had targeted a security vehicle.



“It is a new massacre,” said Dayani, a Sunni originally from the village where the attack happened. “Sectarian militias entered and opened fire at worshippers. Most mosques have no security,” she told Reuters. “Some of the victims were from one family. Some women who rushed to see the

fate of their relatives at the mosque were killed.”



The bloodbath marks a setback for Prime Minister designate Haider al-Abadi, from the majority Shia community, who is seeking support from Sunnis and ethnic Kurds to take on the Islamic State insurgency that is threatening to tear Iraq apart.



In the northern city of Mosul, Islamic State stoned a man to death, witnesses said, as the United States raised the prospect of tackling jihadist safe havens across the border in Syria.



In a regional conflict which is throwing up dilemmas for governments from Washington to London to Baghdad and Tehran, any US action against Islamic State in Syria would risk making common cause with President Bashar al-Assad - the man it has wanted overthrown in a three-year uprising. Islamic State, which this week released a video showing the beheading of American journalist James Foley, stoned the man to death in Mosul after one of its self-appointed courts sentenced him for adultery, the witnesses said.



The parents of Foley, who was kidnapped while covering the Syrian civil war, called on Friday for support to free other foreigners still held by Islamic State fighters. “We do pray, we beg the international community to help the remaining hostages,” Diane Foley said on MSNBC television. “We just pray that they will be set free,” she said after a long conversation with Pope Francis, who the Vatican said called the couple on Thursday afternoon to offer his condolences.