Sugar Cubes

The carnage in Iraq is getting worse by the week. Earlier, I had read reports that estimates for the number of people killed per month in various attacks was about 800. This Saturday, a single bomb killed at least 100:

The death toll in Saturday night’s suicide bombing in the southern Iraqi town of Musayyib reached 100, a local physician said Sunday, as mourners wailed over the loss of their loved ones and anxious relatives of the missing sought signs that they were alive.

Humam Saif, a physician at Musayyib General Hospital, said that with more than 150 wounded spread among area hospitals, the number of dead was likely to rise.

Witnesses to the bombing, which occurred about 8:30 p.m. Saturday in the center of Musayyib, a town 35 miles south of Baghdad, said the attacker had detonated his explosive belt in a crowded marketplace, where hundreds of people had come to shop and mingle after the day’s stifling heat subsided. They said the explosion erupted just as a tanker containing cooking gas was passing, triggering an inferno that destroyed dozens of buildings, including a nearby Shiite mosque where worshipers were emerging from evening prayers.

That’s more than twice the number killed in London bombings last week. Can we have a minute of silence for them too? Can we see their pictures on our television screens, read about their lives, listen to interviews with their loved ones? Even of one of the victims? Once?

My guess is the story will drop from the news by early tomorrow morning. It would have already been gone, probably, if the number murdered were merely 50, only as much as the London killings.

Via Under The Same Sun

Posted in Politics