From Reuters:
BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber who walked into a Baghdad restaurant popular with police outside the Green Zone government compound killed 23 people on Sunday, the bloodiest attack in the capital for six weeks.The al Qaeda group in Iraq led by Jordanian Abu Musab al- Zarqawi claimed the bombing as U.S. and Iraqi troops scoured towns close to the Syrian border that they believe serve as staging posts for foreign fighters coming into the country.
The bomb went off around lunchtime just a few hundred meters (yards) from where Iraq's parliament was meeting inside the fortified Green Zone, once Saddam Hussein's presidential palace compound. Zarqawi and his Iraqi Sunni Arab allies have declared war on the new Shi'ite-led, U.S.-backed government.
Not for more than a month, since U.S. and Iraqi forces launched Operation Lightning, a crackdown on insurgent bomb factories and other rebel activity in the city, has an attack caused so much bloodshed in central Baghdad.
The one-room, street-front restaurant was devastated, with scarcely a stick of blood-spattered furniture intact. Human remains lay on the sidewalk. Police said seven of the 23 dead were police. A further 36 people were wounded...
Where's the PR offensive by the US? where's the counter to Al Jazeera? Why aren't we BUYING out prime priint advertising space and stuffing iot with the grizzly images of the mass-graves uncovered and the beheading videos out there? Is the fine art of plainspeak dead?
voletti - you can't buy the enemy. AP, Reuters, CNN, BBC, all have substantial Muslim shareholdings, and all are primarily responsible for news for the ENTIRE world that comes from the Middle East.
Its the same reason you never see the pictures of Hamas in the Gaza strip using UN sponsored Ambulances with the Red Cross and Red Crescent painted all over them, to get from one place to another. It happens all the time. If the Israeli's shoot it - its plastered all over TV as an act of aggression against unarmed UN vehicles -
Here in Australia at least, our government worries about the concentration of media ownership. Pity they don't worry about which ideologies CONTROL the media (via ownership), rather than worrying about competition.
The Iraqis are STILL incredibly fatalistic and slipshod in the security controls.
Any decent nightclub has a bounced checking people trying to get in.
How long will they blithely allow these nutjobs with a bag of ballbearings glued to their guts to kills dozens daily?
I think a lot of it is the Koranically-induced indifference to life. ("Inshallah", in essense, means: I am a helpless worm, and Allah will kill me if he likes. So why should I even bother trying to protect myself? The virgins and wine are waiting...)
Is that an ear in my falafel?
The Iraqis are STILL incredibly fatalistic and slipshod in the security controls.
Any decent nightclub has a bouncer checking people trying to get in.
How long will they blithely allow these nutjobs with a bag of ballbearings glued to their guts to kills dozens daily?
I think a lot of it is the Koranically-induced indifference to life. ("Inshallah", in essense, means: I am a helpless worm, and Allah will squash me if he likes. So why should I even bother trying to protect myself? The virgins and wine are waiting...)
Is that Abdul in my falafel? Ah well, pass the ketchup.
Sorry for the double posting...
Trying to correct "bounced" to "bouncer", and also softing the final image, and somehow it glitched.