The coach of Iraq's tennis team and two players were shot dead in Baghdad on Thursday, said Iraqi Olympic officials.
Coach Hussein Ahmed Rashid and players Nasser Ali Hatem and Wissam Adel Auda were killed in the al-Saidiya district of the capital.
Witnesses said the three were dressed in shorts and were killed days after militants issued a warning forbidding the wearing of shorts.
....
Two of the athletes stepped out of the car and were shot in the head, said one witness. The third was shot dead in the vehicle.
"The gunman took the body out of the car and threw it on top of the other two bodies before stealing the car," said the witness, who requested anonymity.
He said leaflets had been recently distributed in the area warning residents not to wear shorts.
That's right, people are being murdered in the street for wearing shorts. Even Saddam Hussein didn't do that shit.
Perhaps this is one of the "bricks" this asshole is nattering on about:
In the last month, the recorded rants of al-Qaida's cave-dwelling leadership reflect an awareness that their great gambit has failed. Violent political Islamism isn't defeated -- but its al-Qaida avatar is on the ropes.
This week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki introduced Iraq's new, permanent democratic government. A democracy is emerging in Mesopotamia, altering roughly 7,000 years of recorded history. A predominantly Muslim Middle Eastern state is making modernity work. Though bombs still explode in Baghdad (and those bombs are the 24-7 headlines), Iraqis are slowly taking political and economic control. In historical terms, this is astonishing news, but it is slow news, where the evidence builds brick by incremental brick.
Let's get something straight, once and for all: any current stability in the Iraqi government is afforded entirely to the degree that the religious parties -- the very same religious parties who control the militias murdering people for wearing shorts, or beheading teachers in the middle of class -- hold sway over political life in Iraq. This is not a democracy by any stretch of the imagination, except that people showed up and voted for this violent theocracy, just as they did in Iran.
One more time -- the ceremony of voting does not automatically mean "democracy", no matter how hard one may wish to squint and twist definitions.
The SF Chronicle's Anna Badkhen has been keeping a remarkable journal of daily life in Iraq. This is the sort of thing Iraqi civilians and American troops are facing while the 82nd Chairborne is baying for John Murtha's head on a pike:
When the shroud of dusty night descends on the Iraqi capital Baghdadis pour into streets sodden with sewage to shop, eat and get their late-night haircuts at barber shops that stay open until the midnight curfew.
Fewer roadside bombs or car bombs go off after dark than in the daytime. Families carrying babies in their arms use the relative peace to navigate rancid puddles and gather around bakeries and kiosks that sell freshly squeezed juices.
When the power goes out, shop owners start their generators, and their hum fills the night air.
This is it, day after day after miserable day. Forget al Qaeda, what radicalizes people is the ongoing inability to just live a normal life, and you can't live a normal life when water and electrical power are intermittent at best in 120º summers, when garbage goes uncollected because militias are now targeting even garbage collectors, when sectarian death squads roam villages and neighborhoods seeking violent retribution and imposing vicious terror, when skittish platoons of Marines might or might not just decide to slaughter entire families out of revenge. It's the constant state of fear, of being unable to return to normalcy, that turns neighborhoods into snakepits.
They've been living like that for three years plus now, because the Cheney administration knew better than everyone else, and these people know damned well that we're now just looking for a reasonably honorable exit, a polite handoff to theocratic thugs who will undeniably be influenced heavily by Iran. How's all that supposed to make them anything but apprehensive about their future?
"Leaving aside security," Kassim the carpet salesman asked rhetorically, "when you come home, what do you need?" He ticked off the answers on the fingers on his right hand: "Electricity. Water. Food."
"Getting any of this in Baghdad is a problem," he said.
The Iraqi Shiite's elegant, two-story house in the busy central Baghdad district of Karrada gets power four hours a day -- "one hour on, six hours off," said Kassim, a divorced father of three.
Running water is available for one hour, between 1 and 2 in the morning. Kassim pours the water into giant plastic jugs he stores in his bathroom, kitchen and on the rooftop.
"It's a good thing that I go to bed late," he said.
Three years after the U.S. invasion, during which most of the Iraqi capital's infrastructure collapsed, rudimentary services here remain sporadic at best.
Decades-old water treatment plants that were supposed to have been fixed during postwar reconstruction meet only 60 percent of Baghdad's needs, said Lt. Col. Chris Hall, whose unit, attached to the 101st Airborne Division, is helping Iraqis rebuild power and water facilities.
Garbage chokes the city of 4.5 million people. Trash collection is erratic or nonexistent, depending on which part of the city you live in. Insurgents use heaps of garbage to hide roadside bombs. More than 300 garbage collectors have been killed in Baghdad in the past six months, city officials say. Insurgents target them because they work for the government.
It's impossible to know what the answers are when people refuse to even be honest about the questions.
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