At Least 54 Dead In Iraq Violence
A car bomb ripped through a wholesale food market in western Baghdad on Sunday, flattening cars and shops and killing at least 30 people in the deadliest of a wave of attacks across Iraq that left at least 54 people dead.
The attack came amid an 11-week-old crackdown by U.S.-led forces intended to bring stability to Baghdad.
The blast, which erupted about noon in the mixed Sunni-Shiite Baiyaa neighborhood, devastated the market, reducing cars and trucks to their charred skeletons and ripping the roofs and exteriors off of shops. In addition to the dead, dozens of others were injured.
Pools of blood gathered in the dirt streets. Hospital officials said two pickup trucks filled with body parts were brought to the morgue.
"I was waiting near a shop to lift some boxes, when I saw the owner of the shop fall down," said Satar Hussein, 22, a worker in the market. "I helped him inside the shop, but he was already dead. The next thing I felt was pain in my left shoulder and some people rushing me to the hospital."
Ali Hamid, 25, the owner of a food store, said he was selling boxes of Pepsi when he was hit with shrapnel in his hand.
"I fainted, and the next thing I remember is some people putting me in a pickup with two dead bodies and rushing me to the hospital," he said, condemning the attack as "a terrorist act aiming at creating more sectarian tension and strife."
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Baiyaa, the scene of frequent sectarian violence including a bombing and mortar attack last week that killed seven people.
In Other Developments:
Three U.S. troops were killed in separate attacks in Baghdad and west of the capital, the military said Sunday. Two Marines assigned to Multi National Force-West were killed Saturday while conducting combat operations in Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad, the military said. A roadside bomb killed a Multi-National Division-Baghdad soldier and wounded four others Friday in western Baghdad, the military said separately. The deaths raised to at least 3,365 members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
A British soldier has died from injuries received in a roadside bomb attack in southern Iraq, the Ministry of Defense said Sunday. The ministry said the soldier from the Royal Logistic Corps was injured Thursday when a supply convoy was hit by a roadside bomb in Basra. The soldier was evacuated to Britain for treatment, but died Sunday. The death brings to 148 the number of British troops to have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.
Meanwhile, U.S. and Iraqi troops continued their operations in the city, raiding the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City early Sunday and killing at least eight insurgents in a gunbattle, the U.S. military said. Troops returned fire after being attacked by militants armed with rifles and rockets who were hiding in a building. Four other armed men attacked them from behind a car, and the troops again returned fire, destroying the car, the military said. The troops had targeted the area based on intelligence indicating the presence of an insurgent cell that smuggled weapons from Iran, sent fighters to the neighboring country for training and was involved in a kidnapping network, the military said. The U.S.-led forces destroyed a torture room and a large cache of weapons, including over 150 mortar rounds, during the raid, the military said.
Yesterday, Al Qaeda in Iraq branded the country's Sunni vice president a "criminal" for participating in the U.S.-backed government. The verbal assault on Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi was purportedly delivered by al Qaeda leader Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, in an audiotape posted on an extremist Web site only days after Iraqi authorities claimed he had been killed.
A video was released showing Osama bin Laden's deputy mocking the nearly three-month-old Baghdad security plan, recounting the Apr. 12 suicide bombing at the Iraqi parliament cafeteria in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone, when a bomber slipped through security and blew himself up amid lunching lawmakers, killing one Sunni legislator. "And lest Bush worry, I congratulate him on the success of his security plan, and I invite him on the occasion for a glass of juice, but in the cafeteria of the Iraqi parliament in the middle of the Green Zone," Ayman al-Zawahri said, according to the Washington-based SITE Institute, which monitors militant statements.
U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Me., on a trip to Baghdad with other lawmakers, said Saturday that she is not convinced that the Iraqi leaders have a sense of urgency about achieving political reconciliation. She said she told Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the country's most powerful Shiite political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, that the Iraqi parliament should refrain from taking a recess this summer. "As we are doing the military surge, we should have a political surge by the government," said Snowe, a Republican, during a conference call with reporters. "They (U.S. troops) should not be on the front lines while the parliament is at recess for two months." Snowe said al-Hakim told her no decision had been made but he expected parliament to cut short its recess.
In other violence Sunday, a car bomb near the Ministry of Labor in Baghdad killed four people and wounded eight others, police said.
Insurgents exploded another car bomb outside a police station in the town of Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, killing two police and a bystander, police said.
A few minutes later, militants in the town attacked a police checkpoint near the al-Askari shrine, killing another police officer, police said.
A gunbattle between unidentified gunmen and Iraqi forces in a market in the town of Baqouba 35 miles northeast of Baghdad killed two civilians dead, police said.
In the town of Kut, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, a roadside bomb outside a teacher's house killed three of his children, all of them under the age of 10, police said. The parents were not injured in the attack.
Police also found the bullet-riddled bodies of three men, who were blindfolded, handcuffed and dumped in the Tigris River in the town of Suwayrah, 25 miles south of Baghdad.
© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The attack came amid an 11-week-old crackdown by U.S.-led forces intended to bring stability to Baghdad.
The blast, which erupted about noon in the mixed Sunni-Shiite Baiyaa neighborhood, devastated the market, reducing cars and trucks to their charred skeletons and ripping the roofs and exteriors off of shops. In addition to the dead, dozens of others were injured.
Pools of blood gathered in the dirt streets. Hospital officials said two pickup trucks filled with body parts were brought to the morgue.
"I was waiting near a shop to lift some boxes, when I saw the owner of the shop fall down," said Satar Hussein, 22, a worker in the market. "I helped him inside the shop, but he was already dead. The next thing I felt was pain in my left shoulder and some people rushing me to the hospital."
Ali Hamid, 25, the owner of a food store, said he was selling boxes of Pepsi when he was hit with shrapnel in his hand.
"I fainted, and the next thing I remember is some people putting me in a pickup with two dead bodies and rushing me to the hospital," he said, condemning the attack as "a terrorist act aiming at creating more sectarian tension and strife."
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Baiyaa, the scene of frequent sectarian violence including a bombing and mortar attack last week that killed seven people.
In Other Developments:
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Sign your as*s up and go fight this lost war yourself! Or are you the kind of coward who likes to sit on the sideline like a cheerleader (like Bush) and cheer other peoples kids on to die for nothing? I'm betting the latter.
Until religion is seperated from government in the mid-east we will hurt them more than help them. Leave them alone give them the internet, keep them in their own country and some day knowledge will win out. In the mean time, get out but keep them from coming out until they are truly modernized.
So don't worry about suicide bombers and 'terrist' targetting the Malls of America, we have our own weirdos to do that.
The Middle East, as a conflict zone, sure isn't showing 'peaceful progress', so where can all this be headed? I'm not pessimistic, the news are. Somebody needs to take off those rose-colored glasses.
These are IRAQI citizens people and whether you want to label them "yankess" or "rebs" neither of them are Americans and it is their destiny to decide the fate of their country!
You read the reports about IRANIANS traing Shia Militia and in IRAN and the other 100 Muslim Nations you read about the US Training Shia Security Forces - PLEASE TELL ME THE DIFFERENCE!!!
This is the type of deceit that Bush and War Profitering Cheneyh has been shielding from America for over four years in order to keep US Support behind Keeping our Soldiers in HARMS WAY - with Cheerleaders like Cheney saying on CNN - that we are making enormous progress in IRAQ - STATE of DENIAL! Both should be tried for starting a War that should never have happened with No Weapons of Mass Destruction Found! Iraq was quiet and Saddam kept the sectarion violence in check, but Bush opened the cork and now the can of worms are let loose forever!
How Tragically SAD!
Wow Bu$hco's new stay the course plan is going awsomely well.
Bush and the GOP idiots who follow him have opened the gates of hell.
"You ******* and that god-*** lying sack of *** they call a president are the reason my husband will never see his baby and my kid will never meet his dad."
"And you know what the most ****** up thing about this Iraq *** is? They don't want us there. They're not happy we came and they want us out NOW. We ****** up their lives even worse than they already were and they're pissed off. We didn't help them and we're not helping them now. That's what our soldiers are dying for."
"So I'm pissed. I'm beyond pissed. And I'm going to go to my husband funeral and recieve that flag and hang it up on the wall for my baby to see when he's older. But I'm not going to tell him that his father died for the stupidty of the American government. I'm going to tell him that his father was a hero and the best man I ever met and that he loved his country enough to die for it, because that's all true and nothing will be solved by telling my son that his father was sent to die by people who didn't care about him at all.
"*** you, war supporters, George W. Bush, and all the god *** mother ******* who made the war possible. I hope you burn in hell."
www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/309485032.html
"I'm having the worst *** week of my whole *** life so I'm going to write this while I'm pissed off enough to do it right.
"I am SICK of all this *** people are writing about the Iraq war. I am abso-***-lutely sick to death of it. What the *** do most of you know about it? You watch it on TV and read the commentaries in the newspaper or Newsweek or whatever god *** yuppie news rag you subscribe to and think you're all such *** experts that you can scream at each other like five year old about whether you're right or not. Let me tell you something: unless you've been there, you don't know a god *** thing about it. It you haven't been shot at in that *** hell hole, SHUT THE *** UP!
"How do I dare say this to you moronic war supporters who are "Supporting our Troops" and waving the flag and all that happy horse ***? I'll tell you why. I'm a Marine and I served my tour in Iraq. My husband, also a Marine, served several. I left the service six months ago because I got pregnant while he was home on leave and three days ago I get a visit from two men in uniform who hand me a letter and tell me my husband died in that *** festering sand-pit. He should have been home a month ago but they extended his tour and now he's coming home in a box.
jefferson davis lost his,
johnson lost his
bush will lose his.
the south has lost every war they started.
idiot southern creeps are only good for sunday afternoon parades
in their tight-butt uniforms.
ha,ha,ha.
they still love bush in the south.
war, hate, arrogance, phony christian creeps, rooked republican snakes...
nothing good comes out of the south!
Now why in the WORLD would these people plot to attack us HERE when they have our very best right out there in the Streets of Bagdad fighting in a CIVIL WAR?? Whatever happened to the AMERICAN Core belief that we bring to JUSTICE those who attack us. Those who planned and ordered the attack on this nation aren't even in the SAME Country as the one LOSER Bush is fighting. Thats about as STUPID as it gets folks!!
-----------
I'll go really slow so you can understand.
Our enemies don't want to kill US service folks. They want to kill civilians...US civilians....and lots of them.
Lately, Bill Moyers and his ilk have been very critical of the liberal press for giving the administration a pass before going to war.
Point well made.
However, the REAL reason the press went silent was because after 911, they all hid under their desks, praying that they weren't next. Liberals were scared to death...they were silent, not to give the administration a pass, but because they couldn't speak or type...paralyzed with pure FEAR. A very typical liberal reaction.
Now that things are quiet here in the states with no attacks...liberals have come out from their hiding places and pontificating on the right course of action.
Watch what happens when we get hit again.
The liberal press will go silent, scared for THEIR very existence, waiting for the same people they vilify to come the save them.
If it wasn't so sad, it would be humorous.
Try again
Posted by jscribe58 at 06:33 AM : May 06, 2007
So I assume you have enlisted to do your part to keep our neighborhoods safe....When do you ship out for Iraq??? That's what I thought....dude--