At least random acts of mass murder still make headlines when they happen in Delhi [2]. In Iraq, it's just considered another slow news day at this point. Nothing about this currently appears on the front page of Google News. Will it be mentioned on the front page of tommorrow's New York Times? From the AP [3]:
BAGHDAD, Iraq Oct 29, 2005 — A bomb hidden in a truck loaded with dates exploded Saturday evening in the center of a Shiite farming village northeast of Baghdad, killing 26 people and injuring at least 34. Three American soldiers died in separate bombings in Baghdad and northern Iraq.
In the west of the country, U.S. Marines said they killed 10 extremists Saturday in villages near the Syrian border, where Air Force jets blasted a suspected militant safe house the day before. U.S. officials said an al-Qaida official from Saudi Arabia may have been killed in the airstrike.
The surge in violence occurred as Iraqi political blocs unveiled their lists of candidates for Dec. 15 parliamentary elections, which the United States and its coalition partners hope will help restore enough stability that they can begin sending home their forces next year.
The bomb in the Shiite village of Huweder, about 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, exploded as villagers were heading to the mosque for prayers or outdoors in the cool evening breeze to break daylong fast they observe during the holy month of Ramadan.
"It felt as if the earth was shaking underneath our feet," said Hussein Mouwaffaq, whose brother Qahtan was killed in the blast. "The street was strewn with dates. Many people were killed and injured."
Police Lt. Ahmed Abdul Wahab, who gave the casualty figure, said the number of deaths could increase because several survivors were critically wounded. The village is in a religiously mixed area plagued by suicide attacks, roadside bombs and armed assaults on police checkpoints.
Shiite civilians are frequent targets of Sunni extremists including Iraq's most feared terror group, al-Qaida in Iraq, which considers members of the majority religious community to be heretics and American collaborators. Iraq's security services are staffed mainly by Shiites and Kurds.
At the hospital in nearby Baqouba, seriously wounded victims lay on stretchers on a blood-smeared floor as doctors and nurses in bloodstained white coats scurried about, trying to cope. Distraught relatives held intravenous bottles beside their loved ones' beds.
Oh, and how long before the metronomically predictable Kurt Nimmo [4] tells us this was the work of the CIA?
See our last post [5] on Iraq.
