The Brutality of Iraq’s Civil War Deepens
According to the AP: “Masked Shiite gunmen stopped cars in western Baghdad Sunday and grabbed people off the streets, singling out the Sunni Arabs among them and killing at least 41.”
And lest you think it is only progressives who are calling it a “civil war,” check out what Colin Powell just told Arianna Huffington: “We’re not going to leave behind anything we like because we are in the middle of a civil war.”
AP:
Masked Shiite gunmen stopped cars in western Baghdad Sunday and grabbed people off the streets, singling out the Sunni Arabs among them and killing at least 41, police said.
The rampage in the Jihad neighborhood was in apparent retaliation for the Saturday night car bombing of a Shiite mosque that killed two and wounded nine. Sunni leaders expressed outrage over the Sunday attacks, referring to them as a “massacre.”
Armed men belonging to the Mahdi army, the Shiite militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, sealed off roads leading to the neighboring area of Shula, fearing reprisals, police said, although al-Sadr aides denied their militiamen were behind the attacks. Clashes also were reported in the area and in eastern Baghdad.
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As evening fell two car bombs exploded near a Shiite mosque in central Baghdad, killing 17 people and wounding 45, the police said.
The rampage in the western Jihad neighborhood was in apparent retaliation for the car bombing on Saturday night of another Shiite mosque that killed two people and wounded nine, the police and Shiite leaders said. Many of the victims Sunday were killed after being pulled from their cars at fake police checkpoints close to that mosque.
The violence comes as a blow to the national reconciliation plan of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, which aims to end the bloodletting between his fellow Shiites and the once-dominant Sunnis that has pitched Iraq toward all- out urban warfare in recent months.
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/09/news/iraq.php