A suicide bomber in a fuel truck killed 55 people in a town south of Baghdad on Sunday, the latest in a series of spectacular guerrilla attacks to rattle Iraq.
The bomb, which police said exploded near a Shi'ite mosque and market, also wounded 82 people. It followed several attacks which killed at least 16 people, including three British soldiers, on Saturday.
The frenzy of suicide attacks suggests the government still has a long way to go before stamping out such attacks, which officials say is the biggest security threat to Iraq.
A suicide bomber in a car hit the Doura district in south Baghdad, killing three civilians and two policemen, a police source said.
Violence also erupted near the northern city of Mosul. A suicide bomber strapped with explosives attacked a police station, killing four policemen, police said.
Ten militants blew themselves up across Baghdad on Friday and another attacked Iskindiriya, south of the capital, killing at least 32 people, police said.
In Amara in southeast Iraq, three British soldiers died in what the Ministry of Defense in London said was a suspected roadside bomb. It said the deaths brought to 92 the number of British soldiers who have died in Iraq, including 53 killed in action.
British soldiers, Iraqi policemen, and over 100 civilians, in the past 24 hours.
Looks like Rummy knew something Unca Dick didn't, though I'm sure Cheney's defenders will rush to the dictionary to parse "last" and "throe" as finely as possible. Which, let's face it, is about as intellectually gutless as it gets -- the republic was about to disintegrate from Clinton's pained weaseling on "is" and "alone", but when tens of thousands of lives have been lost or destroyed from Bsuh and Cheney thinking they knew more than everyone else, suddenly we're awash in reckless sophistry from these chumps.
It's really less a matter of the parsing of the terms, so much as this administration's policy is clearly led by a cheerleading Tinkerbell faction. If this were the Super Bowl and we were down by five touchdowns in the third quarter, these idiots would be on the sideline insisting that unless we all ignored the score and painted smiles on our faces, the team can't catch up. Well, no, the only way the team is going to catch up is if the coach realizes that what he's been doing hasn't worked very well, so he'd better make some adjustments and innovate the playbook with a quickness, just to make it respectable at least.
Here is a quickie assessment of how al-Qaeda has begun refueling the Iraqi insurgency. Keep in mind that al-Qaeda were nowhere to be found in Iraq before we invaded, and that if we were serious about our world-renowned Flypaper Doctrine, we could have just ramped up troop levels in Afghanistan and cleaned that mess up properly, instead of leaving it to the mercy of corrupt warlords and their brutal militias, who are running back and forth into Pakistan to help with the worldwide terror insurgency.
Suicide bombers have consistently undermined government promises that January elections would pacify the country, where violence has raised fears Iraq could slide towards civil war.
Militants, driving cars and blending in with the population, can strike without detection by security forces, who themselves have lost hundreds of comrades in the attacks.
Al Qaeda's Iraq wing, led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, boasted that the attacks had given it control of the capital, but there was no sign of militants in the streets.
"Through the day and the night, Baghdad rang with the music of the mujahideen's bullets and the prayers of the martyrs," it said in an Internet statement.
"Our mujahideen now control the streets," it said. "Our sheikh Abu Musab has urged us to intensify our attacks until America is defeated ... and we will continue in our jihad."
There's a Baghdad Bob vibe to it, to be sure. Or you could say it's the insurgent version of Faux News. Stay tuned for The O'Zarqawi Factor, followed by Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North!
Meanwhile, as our British friends set about repairing the damage done in the London terrorist attacks (in a remarkably calm and civilized fashion which is just unthinkable in our overstimulated, hypermilitarized society), more evidence is uncovered about the bombers.
ONE of the London suicide bombers was allowed to tour the Houses of Parliament as the guest of an MP months after police and intelligence services became aware of his links to another alleged bomb plot, it emerged last night.
Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, was a guest of the Labour MP Jon Trickett in July 2004, four months after he had been identified by intelligence officials as a "criminal associate" of one of the subjects of a major counter-terrorism operation that had resulted in several arrests.
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The astonishing revelation about the killer's Commons visit throws into question previous assertions that none of the bombers was known to police in connection with terrorist allegations and comes amid growing concerns about how the bombers were allowed to strike.
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Pakistani intelligence officials are looking into a connection between one of the three Britons and two al-Qaeda-linked militant groups in that country. They confirmed that Shahzad Tanweer spent four or five days at a complex run by the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba - as first reported by The Scotsman - and said he also met a member of another al-Qaeda-linked Pakistani terrorist group who was later arrested for bombing a church in Islamabad.
More details emerged yesterday that there had been indications an attack was imminent. Plans for attacks on targets in both the United States and Britain were discovered among material found during the capture of Abu Faraj Farj al-Liby, one of the most senior al-Qaeda leaders, and of a Pakistani computer expert, Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan. Some intelligence officials said those plans included attacks on London's transport system, as well as Heathrow Airport.
As always, I am simply shocked. Our good buddies Pakistan, yet again. Yeah, I'm sure the ISI and the military are just going all out to make sure these groups are captured and brought to justice.
Here is a profile of one of the other dirtbags involved in the London attack.
It seems he thought he had found Islam. He grew a beard and began dressing in traditional Muslim clothes. When he was last spotted by the friend he had shaved off his beard. Al-Qa'ida analysts have claimed that may be a sign of a radicalised Muslim's intention to become a terrorist. The friend said: "I asked him why he had shaved off the beard. He said it was a long story and that he did not like one mosque saying one thing and another mosque saying that was the wrong way. When he heard so many arguments he thought, 'Forget it. I will go my own way'."
Of course, holding mainstream Islam responsible for these assholes is like blaming the Catholic Church for the IRA, or the Protestants for the Ku Klux Klan. And since Islam has no centralized authority, no pope, it is much more riven with sectarianism than the Judeo-Christian faiths. Plus it is in dire need of a Reformation, an Age of Enlightenment, a worldwide recognition of the primacy of the individual's right to free will and personal choice. It reposes a bit too handily in cultures where the violent oppression of women and minorities is still all too common.
I do not think it will do much good for us to attempt to enforce such modern mores upon them, but I submit that until they decide to get serious and do it for themselves, they will only fall further behind and become more embittered. They hate us because we want their oil, but what happens when we innovate and develop technology and conservation practices that wean us from that shriveled petro-tit once and for all? There's nothing else we can use of theirs; they'll fall right off the radar.
It's a catch-22, and because they are the poorer and less-educated in this relationship, they will suffer infinitely more once we do pull out for good, a generation or two down the road. If they get serious and start emulating, say, the Indian model of plurality and emphasis on education, they might have a fighting chance, but the Islamic world will never get on the right track until they get serious about weeding their own garden.
And as more episodes like this occur, the harder it's going to be for them to get on that track.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 12 - Iraq's widely feared police commandos were struggling on Tuesday to explain how at least 10 Sunni Arab men and youths, one only 17, suffocated after a commando unit seized them from a hospital emergency ward and locked them in a police van in summer temperatures exceeding 110 degrees.
As relatives collected the bodies from Baghdad's main morgue and drove them to a village near Abu Ghraib for burial, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr was meeting with two police generals who run the commando units, preparing for a government statement that Mr. Jabr's office said would be made Wednesday.
One of the officers, Brig. Gen. Rashid Flaieh, acknowledged in a telephone interview that the victims suffocated inside what he described as "an armored van." But he denied accounts by one survivor that the victims had been kept in the van for more than 12 hours, saying it was "only two hours." He also rejected assertions by doctors who examined the bodies that the victims, in addition to suffocation, had been subjected to torture with electric shocks.
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For the commandos, many of them veterans of Saddam Hussein's army, police and intelligence units, the incident was the latest in a long series of incidents in which they have been accused of using brutal techniques learned during Mr. Hussein's years of terror. Doctors who witnessed the victims being dragged from the hospital ward identified the government men as members of the notorious First Brigade of the commandos, but General Flaieh said that the unit involved was a separate police paramilitary force known as the Special Security Force.
What was certain was that the deaths provided a new flashpoint in relations between the American-backed transitional government, in office for 10 weeks, and the country's Sunni Arab minority, which is already angry and frustrated over the transfer of power to the Shiite majority that the new government represents. Charges of abuse by the police commandos have been one of many obstacles the new government has faced in attempting to draw Sunni Arab groups into the process of writing a new constitution and preparing for fresh elections in December. The commandos have some Sunni commanders, but most of the rank and file is Shiite.
American officers involved in the $11 billion effort to train and equip Iraq's army and police have privately acknowledged that they know of instances in which police commandos have violated detainees' rights, using various forms of physical abuse. One senior officer said American commanders have insisted to Iraqi generals that the abuse plays into the hands of the insurgents and that it should stop. "But in the end, this is an Iraqi war, and the Iraqis will fight it in their own way," the officer said, in a discussion that he agreed to on condition that he not be named.
Many of the abuses were chronicled in a report issued in January by Human Rights Watch, which found that Iraqi security forces were committing "systematic torture and other abuses."
Among these, it listed cramming detainees "into small cells with standing room only," and depriving detainees of food and water. The report said other torture techniques used by the Iraqi forces included electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body, including earlobes and genitals, and beatings with cables, hosepipes and other implements.
It would be easy to characterize all this as the usual "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" stuff, but at least Saddam kept the theocrats in their cage. We have let them loose. Imagine medieval Shia mullahs with Saddam's death squads.
Eventually they'll take care of the fabled throes themselves, and then clamp down on the rest of the poor citizens with an iron fist.
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