Red Morning

Blast Kills 10 as Violence Flares in Baghdad

By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: July 10, 2006

BAGHDAD, July 10 — A mob of gunmen went on a brazen daytime rampage through a predominantly Sunni Arab district of western Baghdad on Sunday, pulling people from their cars and homes and killing them in what officials and residents called a spasm of revenge by Shiite militias for the bombing of a Shiite mosque on Saturday. Hours later, two car bombs exploded beside a Shiite mosque in another Baghdad neighborhood in a deadly act of what appeared to be retaliation.

Violence continued in Baghdad today, as a bomb killed 10 people and wounded at least 49 in the Sadr City section, a Shiite stronghold. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki responded with a plea for Iraqis to "unite as brothers," Reuters reported.

"Our destiny is to work together in brotherhood to defeat terrorism and insurgency," he told the Kurdish regional parliament in northern Iraq,

While Baghdad has been ravaged by Sunni-Shiite bloodletting in recent months, even by recent standards the violence here on Sunday was frightening, delivered with impunity by gun-wielding vigilantes on the street. In the culture of revenge that has seized Iraq, residents all over the city braced for an escalation in the cycle of retributive mayhem between the Shiites and Sunnis that has threatened to expand into civil war.

The violence coincided with an announcement by American military officials that they had formally accused four more American soldiers of rape and murder, and a fifth soldier of "dereliction of duty" for failing to report the crimes, in connection with the deaths of a teenage Iraqi girl and three members of her family.

With movement in Baghdad difficult after a military cordon was established to suppress the violence, facts were hard to ascertain. The death toll from the shootings alone ranged from fewer than a dozen, according to the American military, to more than 40 reported by some news services. The bombing near the mosque later claimed at least 19 lives and left 59 wounded, officials said.

The military's announcement about the soldiers brought to six the number implicated in the rape-murder, one more than previously disclosed. The case has enraged Mr. Maliki and led to apologies by the highest American military and civilian officials in Iraq. A photograph of the girl's passport distributed by news agencies on Sunday showed that she was 14.

Juan Cole uses Arabic language sources to demonstrate that the weekend was a bloodbath. If this is not civil war in fact, I can't imagine what one looks like.