The death toll is now 100 after a suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt in a crowded marketplace Saturday in Musayyib, a highway town near Baghdad. The explosion erupted just as a tanker containing cooking gas passed by. There were four more suicide bombings Sunday.


“[A]n Iraqi parliamentarian close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called the weekend’s onslaught of suicide bombings a sign that Iraq is slipping into civil war,” writes Juan Cole.


People find it safest to stay home. Besides bombers, they fear nervous U.S. soldiers who see every car as a potential bomb. But they can’t, reports Patrick Cockburn for The Independent.

Much of Baghdad is getting only five hours of electricity a day. People must buy fuel for their small Chinese-made generators. But queues by the petrol stations are two or three kilometres long. As people wait in their cars, they are vulnerable to bombers targeting US and Iraqi government patrols. There is a growing water shortage, forcing people on to the streets to look for supplies. […]


For most people in Baghdad, poor, crowded into small houses, enduring 45C temperatures there is nothing to protect them. Their children must play in the streets because there is no room at home.


“It is not just the number of the dead and injured that makes the bombings in Baghdad so much worse than London,” Cockburn notes. “A single incident of danger is easier to endure than relentless attack and the knowledge that the bombers were here yesterday and tomorrow they will return again.” Watch/listen to Cockburn’s interview today on Democracy Now!.