From Times Online
April 18, 2007
Carnage in Iraq as 157 confirmed dead
David Byers and agencies
At least 157 people have been killed in a spate of bombings in Iraq today.
The deadliest of four strikes was a suspected Sunni car-bomb near central Baghdad, which was believed to have killed at least 112.
The explosives-rigged car blew up a market in the Al-Sadriyah district, home to a mixed Kurdish and Shia population.
Among the dead were reportedly several construction workers, who had been rebuilding the marketplace after a bomb destroyed many shops and killed 137 people there in February.
The number of fatalities from the incident was expected to rise further, as 115 other people were reported to have been injured in the blast, including women and children, Raad Muhsin, an official at Al-Kindi Hospital where the victims were taken, told the AP news agency.
In other blasts during a bloody day in Iraq today, a suicide car bomber crashed into an Iraqi police checkpoint at the entrance to Sadr City, the capital's biggest Shia Muslim neighbourhood and a stronghold of the radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, killing 30 and wounding 45.
A third explosion saw a parked car explode near a private hospital in the central Baghdad neighborhood of Karradah, killing 11 people and wounding 13. The blast was reported to have damaged the Abdul-Majid hospital and other nearby buildings.
The other explosion, on a minibus in the northwestern Risafi area of Baghdad, killed four and wounded six others, officials told AP.
The death toll incurred in the wartorn country increased still further when it was later revealed that four policemen in Baghdad had been killed when gunmen ambushed their patrol south of the city centre.
6 comments:
I'm glad other people realize the insignificance of the Virginia Tech shooting in comparison to the killings around the world! I feel bad for the people at Virginia Tech, but it was one day and 32 dead, in Iraq, the shootings are every day. That is only one country, there are people dying from violence all over the globe every day. Somehow, though, 32 college students are more important - I think not.
the old man charon: I thought that it needed a sense of proportion, even though I may come in for a bit of stick for posting this. It's not that I am insensitive to what happened over there, but this story to my reckoning is at least 4 times a bigger tragedy.
I think that 4 times bigger is an understatement. I agree that what happened at Virginia Tech is unfortunate, but the those of us in the United States need the wake up call that death is real and happens all the time. I wrote a similar post to yours (I Tried to be Patient), and I noticed you visited my blog, but I don't know if you saw it. It is just my rantings, but I find it important that a lawyer like yourself agrees. I've been looking at your blog, and I find your story interesting. You come with an interesting perspective, which is very good.
I fear that the next campus killer or killers will be seeking to beat this score by at least 50 or more. All the media attention does not help either, because it feeds the going out with a bang and the bigger the bang the better. It's only when it's brought home that America wakes up. For example, 9/11.
Globally the VT death toll pales into insignificance anyway compared to the total gun-homicide rate per annum for the USA which is about 11,000 vs about 100 in UK and a handful for Canada (with similar gun ownership rate).
In other words in USA gun homicides are at 2200% of our rate here as we have a fifth of the population. In the USA today, tomorrow and everyday there will be around 33 deaths on average from culpable gun use.
I'm not sure that anyone will be going to best this record. I reckon our hero would have stopped sooner if he hadn't found the killing life affirming and hadn't been scared to die himself.
There are a lot of cranks out there Paul. I would be more surprised if somebody didn't try to beat the record. The difference between this and the amount of deaths every day by gun crime in the States is that it was all in one incident.
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