106 Dead in Iraqi Bomb Blast
What a pointless waste of life:
| quote: | HILLA, Iraq (Reuters) - A suicide car bomber killed 105 people and wounded 130 near a crowded marketplace south of Baghdad on Monday in the single bloodiest attack in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
The bomber drove a car into a crowd of people queuing outside a government building in the town of Hilla, 100 km (62 miles) south of the capital. Many of those killed were shopping at stalls across the road.
Reuters television footage showed a pile of bloodied bodies outside the building. Smoke rose from the wreckage of burned-out market stalls as bystanders loaded mangled corpses on to wooden carts, usually used to carry fruit and vegetables.
Others were piled into the back of pick-up trucks.
"We finished now transporting the bodies from the site. There were 105 people dead and 130 wounded," said doctor Mahmoud Abdul Ridah, an official in the local health authority.
"We've called on people to donate blood and have opened a center for that," he told Reuters. "We've called on doctors from Kerbala, Diwaniyah and Najaf to come and help and they have started to arrive."
The toll makes the blast the single deadliest attack since the fall of Saddam in April 2003 and makes Monday one of the bloodiest days of the two-year insurgency.
The worst day was last March, when more than 170 people were killed in a series of suicide bombings in Baghdad and the holy city of Kerbala, just west of Hilla.
The target of the latest attack appeared to be a crowd of people waiting outside the building to get health certificates needed to apply for government jobs.
Insurgents, fighting to drive U.S. troops out of Iraq and wreck the country's transition to democracy, have often targeted people looking for state jobs. They frequently target police and army recruits but have also killed local government workers.
The attack came as Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi acknowledged Iraq's security forces were still unable to take on the insurgency without the help of U.S.-led troops.
"Iraqis should be able to start taking over more and more security responsibilities very soon," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "But we will continue to need and to seek assistance for some time to come." |
http://olympics.reuters.com/newsArt...99&pageNumber=1
I was a bit down after having a shitty day at work but then heard this on the radio coming home and it put it all in perspective. How do people become fucked up enough to consider comitting an attrocity like this to be a good idea? 
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