I’m sorry to post a diary that consists only of quotes, but this needs to be said…
July 7th in England
Around 700 people were wounded, markets plummeted before partially recovering and Prime Minister Tony Blair rushed to London from the Group of Eight summit in Scotland after branding the attacks “barbaric”.
July 7th in Iraq
MOSUL – At least 10 mortar rounds fell in a crowded market in central Mosul near the city’s provincial council headquarters. Hospital officials said three Iraqi civilians were killed and 52 injured from the blasts. A second such attack killed two civilians and wounded seven, the U.S. military said.
MASHRU – A double car bomb killed 18 people and wounded dozens late on Wednesday in Mashru, near the mainly Shi’ite city of Hilla, hospital sources said. It was the deadliest attack in Iraq for several days.
BAGHDAD – At dawn, Iraqi police commandos stormed the Dahab neighbourhood of the western Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib, recovering dozens of tonnes of fuel and oil hijacked from road tankers and stored in underground tanks for resale on the black market, Interior Minister Bayan Jabor told a news conference. Fuel shortages have been a major grievance in Baghdad for months.
BAGHDAD – Jabor also said an al Qaeda cell comprising eight members, including officers, from his ministry’s 8th Armoured Brigade, a mechanised counter-insurgency unit, had been arrested and accused of plotting to kill senior officials and to blow up the Interior Ministry headquarters.
TIKRIT – Around 1,000 protesters clashed with Iraqi police outside Tikrit’s police headquarters, a Reuters witness said. One policeman was killed and three protestors were injured when the crowd overran the building, a local government spokesman said. The protests were triggered by the killing of a former mayor in the town which his tribe blamed on a rival clan.
BAGHDAD – Iraq’s Interior Minister said a counter-insurgency campaign in central Iraq dubbed Operation Lightning had captured 1,691 suspects so far, including 43 foreign Arabs. Bayan Jabor said 14 members of Iraq’s security forces have died in the operation and a total of 160 car and roadside bombs were defused.
BAGHDAD – Three Baghdad barbers were shot dead by militants on Tuesday in Baghdad, a Defence ministry statement said on Thursday. Radical Islamists have killed dozens of barbers in the past year for giving clean shaves which they say is “un-Islamic”.
BAIJI – An Iraqi soldier and a civilian were shot and killed as they were driving in a civilian car on Wednesday in the northern Iraqi town of Baiji, the defence ministry said.
(Reporting by Maher al-Thanoon in Mosul, Amer Amery in Tikrit,
Mussab Khairalla, Alastair Macdonald and Hiba Mousa in Baghdad)
