BAGHDAD, Iraq — A suicide truck bomber struck a market in a predominantly Shiite area of Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least 121 people and wounding scores among the crowd buying food for evening meals, the most devastating strike in the capital in more than two months. […]
Officials said at least 121 people were killed and 226 wounded. The Kindi hospital, Baghdad’s main emergency facility, quickly filled and asked ambulances from the bombing to take the injured elsewhere. […]
The blast was the deadliest attack in the capital since Nov. 23, when suspected al-Qaida in Iraq fighters attacked the capital’s Sadr City Shiite slum with a series of car bombs and mortars that struck in quick succession, killing at least 215 people.
A suicide bomber also crashed his car into the Bab al-Sharqi market, near Sadriyah, on Jan. 22, killing 88 people.
South of Baghdad, a pair of suicide bombers detonated explosives Thursday among shoppers in a crowded outdoor market in the Shiite city of Hillah, killing at least 73 people and wounding 163, police said.
Things would get worse if we left? They seem to be getting worse regardless. As for US troops, well, we have had 4 helicopter “crashes” within 2 weeks:
BAGHDAD, Iraq — A U.S. helicopter went down today in Iraq for the fourth time in two weeks, and America’s top general acknowledged that its aircraft were increasingly in danger from ground fire. […]
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the extra troops that Iraq promised to send into Baghdad in a new U.S.-Iraqi military buildup are arriving on schedule but in inadequate numbers.
Inadequate numbers? Secretary Gates has already mastered the art of understatement, I see. Guess he’s a quick study. Oh, and the civil war seems to have opened a new front in Kirkuk between Kurds and — Shia militias? Sunni insurgents? Who knows.
In the northern city of Kirkuk, eight bombs exploded within two hours, beginning with a suicide car bomber who targeted the offices of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, leader of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, police said. Two people were killed in the first explosion, which devastated four nearby houses.
Nobody claimed responsibility for the attacks in the oil-rich region, but there are concerns that insurgents have fled north to avoid the impending crackdown in Baghdad. Ethnic tensions also have risen in the area over a Kurdish bid to incorporate it into their autonomous region to the north.
And Hillary Clinton hasn’t ruled out a strike against Iran, echoing the Bush administration’s talking points almost word for word. Will wonders the horrors never cease?
For anyone pondering my last query, that’s strictly a rhetorical question.
heh—less than a minute apart….
I’ll bump yours above mine.
Thanks
Ireland was never like this…this is insane.
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BAGHDAD (NYTimes) Jan. 16 — The United Nations reported that more than 34,000 Iraqis were killed in violence last year, a figure that represents the first comprehensive annual count of civilian deaths and a vivid measure of the failure of the Iraqi government and American military to provide security.
The U.N. report (pdf) was the first attempt at hand-counting individual deaths for an entire year. It was compiled using reports from morgues, hospitals and municipal authorities across Iraq, and was nearly three times higher than an estimate for 2006 compiled from Iraqi ministry tallies by The Associated Press earlier this month.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."And those were just the direct results of violence. Think of the preventable deaths from other causes that have resulted from the effects of the violence.
Then add to that the indefinite number of years where people in Iraq(and our troops) will die due to the pollution in the ground/air from our bombs and bullets that are tipped with uranium…add also unexploded cluster bombs to the mix that will keep on killing or maiming for years and other after effects of war like PTS and the carnage and devastation of war stretches far far beyond the end to fighting.