Scores Killed on Eve of Iraq Invasion’s 10th Anniversary

[ErikJ]

Source: NY Times

Scores Killed on Eve of Iraq Invasion’s 10th Anniversary
By TIM ARANGO
BAGHDAD — Iraq closed a painful decade just as it began: with explosions reverberating around the capital.

Beginning in the early morning Tuesday with the killing of a Finance Ministry official with a bomb attached to his vehicle and continuing for hours, the attacks were a devastating reminder of the violence that regularly afflicts Iraq. And they somehow seemed more poignant coming on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the American-led invasion.

By midmorning, the familiar sight of black smoke rose above a cityscape of palm fronds, turquoise-tiled mosque domes and squat concrete buildings. By midafternoon, the numbers had stacked up: 57 dead and nearly 190 wounded in separate attacks that included 17 car bombs, 2 adhesive bombs stuck to cars, and a killing with a silenced gun.

Most attacks hit Shiite neighborhoods. Their targets varied: restaurants, a bank, a vegetable market and a parking garage. Others were near a courthouse and a university, and some seemed to have no target other than innocent passers-by. Many Iraqis say they worry about an increase in sectarian tensions. Though there were no immediate claims of responsibility, the attacks were carried out in the fashion of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the Sunni insurgent group weakened but not vanquished by the American military.

Harder to measure was the number of lives interrupted.

A couple of hours after a car bomb struck outside his apartment building in the Shiite neighborhood called New Baghdad, Shwan Jameel rummaged through the clothes and blankets, sprinkled with shards of glass, until he found a blue nylon bag filled with memories.

Inside were business cards of former bosses, badges he used to enter the Green Zone when he was a security guard for the American occupiers, and letters in support of a visa application to emigrate to the United States that he said had never been answered.

“It is with great pleasure that I am able to detail his accomplishments and record his service,” one American official wrote in a letter from 2004 in which he described how Mr. Jameel had saved American lives after an ambush in Mosul during the height of the war.

“Many of us are here thanks, in no small part, to Shwan and his bravery,” the official wrote.

Mr. Jameel’s family was unharmed by the morning’s blast, which killed or wounded several other people, and he was able to conjure his sense of humor. “I’m just smiling because it’s too crazy,” he said. “Life is funny here.”

In the apartment next to Mr. Jameel’s, Layla Alwain, a mother of six in a black abaya, wailed: “Too much hurt, too much pain. Where should we go?”

“Poverty, hunger, pain,” she said, ticking off the features of her life. “We’ve got nothing, and it’s getting worse and worse. Our country is not developing like others.”

She added: “This explosion didn’t happen at the president’s house. It happened in front of the poor people’s house.”

Her husband, Abbas Rydah, a day laborer, echoed the feeling of many Iraqis who link the bickering among political factions and violence in the streets. And he suggested that forbearance could help end the deep-seated grudges at the root of the violence.

“We just need to forgive our brothers,” he said. Then he broke down crying.

“This is the situation we live in?” he said. “It just hurts.”

....................................CLIP

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/world/middleeast/attacks-in-baghdad-before-iraq-war-anniversary.html?hp&_r=0

[Arctic Dave]

1. I foresee a bloody, ruthless purging of sunnis from Iraq.

I would give it another year of these type of bombing and the shiite majority will start an out and out genocide of the sunnis.

[Historic NY]

2. Mission Accomplished - George heck of a job you done.