Meanwhile, the London terror, which has shocked the world, is roughly equivalent to your average bad day in Iraq, as TruthOut reminds us.
23 Killed in Bombing at Baghdad Recruiting Center
By John F. Burns
The New York TimesMonday 11 July 2005
Baghdad – A brief lull in the suicide bombings here ended on Sunday when an attacker mingling with a crowd of men outside an Iraqi Army recruiting center detonated an explosive vest, killing at least 23 volunteers and wounding at least 40 others.
The attack came on a day when the war claimed at least 43 victims, including a mother and eight children ages 2 to 19, who were shot to death before dawn Sunday as they slept at their home in southern Baghdad.
Another victim was an Iraqi karate champion who was kidnapped outside Baghdad on Friday at a fake checkpoint. His body was found 24 hours later floating in the Tigris River near Kut, 100 miles south, said an Iraqi Olympic official who announced the death on Sunday and said he knew of no motive.
The slaying of nine family members appeared to be the starkest instance yet of a surge in sectarian killings in Baghdad involving Sunni and Shiite communities in this city of six million.
Hussein al-Tarash, the father, who was away from home when the killers struck, said his family, Shiites, had been the targets of gunmen retaliating for the killing of a Sunni barber by Shiites.
The barber’s family insisted that Mr. Tarash was the killer, but he proclaimed his innocence. One child, an 11-year-old boy, was seriously wounded but survived.
See our last post on Iraq.
