At least 25 people were killed when a suicide bomber rammed his truck into a line of Iraqis waiting for cooking gas near a checkpoint outside the Baiji oil refinery in northern Iraq, the police said Tuesday.Estimates of the death toll varied. The police in Baiji and the Interior Ministry in Baghdad said 25 were killed and 80 wounded, while Col. Dara Ghafour, an Iraqi Army spokesman based in Kirkuk, put the death toll at 29.
Among the dead were children, civilians, members of Iraqi security forces and members of the American-financed armed groups known as the Awakening Council, who were in charge of the nearby checkpoint beside the huge state-owned refinery, Iraqi security officials said.
Then the next 10 or so killed:
In the province of Diyala north of Baghdad, a suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives struck a funeral in the city of Baquba, killing 10 people and wounding five, the U.S. military said. Iraqi police said the blast wounded 21 people and said all casualties were members of the neighborhood patrols.
Police said the funeral was for a father and a son who had worked as armed volunteers with the U.S. military. They had been killed hours earlier in a shootout with U.S. forces. The U.S. military said its troops had killed two "armed individuals," one a patrol member, but was not certain whether that incident was linked to the funeral...
...The blast left a 2-1/2 meter-deep crater in the road, destroyed a guardhouse near the complex and smashed the windows and fronts of nearby apartment buildings. People were digging through the rubble looking for bodies, the photographer said.
Yep, as UPI reported today, it's harder and harder to be a living Christian in post-U.S. invasion Iraq:
Some Iraqi priests estimate as many as two-thirds of the country's Christians -- about 1 million people -- have fled since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The homes and businesses of Christians have been frequent targets of insurgent attacks.
Sacred Heart church in Baghdad attracted 120 people for Christmas Eve Mass Monday, down from 400 in 2005.
"Last year it was full," said parishioner Yusef Hanna. "So many people have left -- gone up north, or out of the country."
I'm just guessing it's a safer choice than staying.
And then there's the front out invasion has opened between Turkey, which CheneyCo could not convince to allow the U.S. to send our military through prior to the 2003 (yes, closing in on six years as of March 19th) U.S. invasion., and northern Iraq a.k.a. Kurdistan:
Turkish planes bombed an area of Iraq near the border with Turkey on Tuesday to attack Kurdish separatists and the army said it had killed at least 150 guerrillas in its air offensive earlier this month.A Turkish military source said warplanes launched the limited strike on Tuesday after spotting Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas during a reconnaissance flight. He said the strike was smaller than others in recent weeks.
Colonel Hussein Tamar, director of Iraq's border guard command in the northern Kurdish province of Dahuk, said villages near the border were hit but nobody was hurt.
The area was depopulated because residents had fled earlier attacks, he said.
Fleeing away from the border deeper into Iraq, kind of counterintuitive you'd think, but actually makes sense when you think about it. Becomes a mosaic of movement, of fleeing. These peoples here, those peoples there, to-and-fro fleeing.
Ultimately reorganizing -- not only getting rid of Saddam's long rule, but reconfiguring Iraqi society and parts of the surrounding countries based on desperation, violence, slaughter.
Let's hope next year there's a better attempt at Peace on Earth, and Goodwill to All.
We, as a species, have surely done worse, but I'd label this year as naughty, all the wrong kinds of naughty at that.
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