Honest, paywall-free news is rare. Please support our boldly independent journalism with a donation of any size.
Baghdad – Four car bombs, one of them a suicide car bomb, and 11 roadside bombs, shook Baghdad Thursday morning, killing at least 63 and wounding 185 people, adding new tension during a growing national political crisis. The explosions occurred in a variety of locations around the Iraqi capital, some Shiite and others Sunni, giving no clear indication who was behind it. The casualties were believed to be almost entirely civilians.
Kamil al Zaidi, the head of the Baghdad provincial council, noted that the explosions did not occur in strategic locations — one was close to a hospital and another close to a school, with the suicide car bomb exploding in a small street off a main thoroughfare. “This could happen anywhere in the world — that someone places a shopping bag containing an explosive device next to a wall or a building,” he said. “It is not something that reflects negatively on the capabilities of the security forces.” But he said there were some weaknesses in the security system, and they will be strengthened “to prevent this scenario from repeating itself.”
Politicians and citizens alike linked the bombings to the current political crisis, centering charges against Sunni Vice President Tareq al Hashemi that members of his security detail have carried out assassinations against senior Shiite military personnel. Iraqi television reported today that Kurdish officials are refusing to honor the arrest warrant against Hashemi.
© 2011 McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
Truthout has licensed this content. It may not be reproduced by any other source and is not covered by our Creative Commons license.
We lost 15 percent of our traffic overnight.
We now have three full months of data since Google changed its search to feature AI results. The numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.
We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.
We anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone.
The only way we can keep publishing is with strong reader support. We are asking you to start a monthly donation to Truthout today — anything you can do, whether $5 or $25, makes a difference.