Massacres Soar in Central Iraq: Maliki Government Discredited

In the last ten days, while the world has been absorbed by the war in Lebanon, sectarian massacres have started to take place on an almost daily basis leading observers to fear a level of killing approaching that of Rwanda immediately before the genocide of 1994. On one single spot on the west bank of the Tigris river in north Baghdad between 10 and 12 bodies have been drifting ashore every day.

In Kufa, a city on the Euphrates south of Baghdad, the suicide bomber drove his vehicle into a dusty square 100 yards from a Shia shrine at 7.30am. He knew that poor day laborers gathered there looking for work. He said “I need labourers” and they clambered into his van which exploded a few moments later killing them and other workers standing around. “Four of my cousins were killed,” said Nasir Feisal, who survived the blast. “They were standing beside the van. Their bodies were scattered far apart by the blast.

The dramatic escalation in sectarian killings started on July 9 when black-clad Shia militiamen sealed off the largely Sunni al-Jihad district in west Baghdad and slaughtered every Sunni they identified, killing over 40 of them after glancing at their identity cards. Since then there has been a tit-for-tat massacre almost every day. On Monday gunmen, almost certainly Sunni, first attacked Shia mourners at a funeral near Mahmoudiya, a market town of 100,00 people 75 miles north of Kufa. They then shot down another 50 people in the local market.

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