The struggle escalated in Iraq today as a suicide bomber killed 105 people — one of the biggest outrages there so far — and wounded 130.
This was the single bloodiest attack since Sadaam Hussein fell in April 2003. Reuters:
The bomber drove a car into a crowd of people queuing outside a government building in the town of Hilla, 100 km (62 miles) south of the capital. Many of those killed were shopping at stalls across the road.
According to the AP, the bomber had a specific target in mind:
HILLA, Iraq (AP) – A suicide car bomber attacked a crowd of police and Iraqi National Guard recruits south of Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 106 and wounding 133 in one of the bloodiest days of the two-year insurgency.
Reuters adds:
Reuters television footage showed a pile of bloodied bodies outside the building. Smoke rose from the wreckage of burned-out market stalls as bystanders loaded mangled corpses on to wooden carts, usually used to carry fruit and vegetables.
Others were piled into the back of pick-up trucks.
“We finished now transporting the bodies from the site. There were 105 people dead and 130 wounded,” said doctor Mahmoud Abdul Ridah, an official in the local health authority.
“We’ve called on people to donate blood and have opened a center for that,” he told Reuters. “We’ve called on doctors from Kerbala, Diwaniyah and Najaf to come and help and they have started to arrive.”
Meanwhile, there is also lots of good news happening in Iraq and Arthur Chrenkoff has it.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.