Middle East in flames: Gift from the USA.

[Jabhad]

Times Online November 23, 2006

 

 

Car bombs kill 150 in Baghdad on day of Sunni attacks

Sam Knight and agencies

 

 

 

A series of mortar blasts and car bombs devastated several streets in the Shia stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad today, killing nearly 150 people and wounding more than 230, Iraqi officials said.

 

 

 

Witnesses said mortar fire and as many as six car bombs, each packed with as much as half a tonne of explosives, tore through markets and shopping streets, starting just after 3pm local time. The bombs detonated 15 minutes apart, hitting Jamila market, al-Hay market and al-Shahidein Square in Sadr City.

 

Whole streets were destroyed, leaving bloodied remains and fierce fires burning amid the ruined shells of cars. Officials said the death toll was expected to rise because many bodies still lay in pieces in the street. "Many of the dead have been reduced to scattered body parts and are not counted yet," Ali al-Shemari, Iraq's Health Minister, told Reuters.

 

The attack, one of the deadliest since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, was quickly blamed on Sunni extremists intent on causing the maximum loss of life in the neigbourhood that is home to the Mahdi Army militia, the Shia militia loyal to Iraq's leading radical Shia cleric, Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr.

 

The bombs provoked instant retaliation. Shia militias fired 10 mortar rounds at the Abu Hanifa mosque in Azamiya, the holiest Sunni shrine in Baghdad, killing one person and wounding seven people.

 

In Sadr City, police and doctors said 145 people had been killed and 238 had been injured in the blasts. Hospitals were overwhelmed by the arrival of the dead and wounded. "Of those killed, 88 bodies are in the Imam Ali hospital and 55 in Sadr City hospital," a medic told AFP.

 

Sadr City, a suburb of 3 million people, nearly all of them Shia, has been bombed with an increasing frequency during Iraq's slide towards civil war this year, with its militias, mosques and markets a target for Sunni militants seeking to deepen the country's sectarian divide.

 

More than 3,700 people were killed in Baghdad last month, the UN reported yesterday, many of them caught in tit-for-tat murders, kidnappings and bombings motivated by nothing more than tribal and religious differences.

 

The most serious bomb attacks in the capital this year followed an audacious attack by Sunni militants on the Iraqi Health Ministry, which is also controlled by Hojatoleslam al-Sadr, earlier today. Five people were wounded in a three-hour gun battle in broad daylight that only ended when American soldiers and helicopters drove off the gunmen.

 

During the assault, the Deputy Health Minister, Hakim al-Zamily, spoke by telephone to Reuters, saying: "Terrorists are attacking the building with mortars, machineguns and we can even see snipers. Any employee who leaves the building will be killed."

 

The Interior Ministry said that gunmen surrounded the ministry, which is in the northern part of central Baghdad, in a predominantly Shia neighbourhood. The gun battle was unusually prolonged, and only broken up when US forces, with helicopter gunships in support, arrived on the scene.

 

"The gunmen fled as American helicopters and Iraqi armored vehicles arrived. Employees were able to leave starting about 3:15 pm," said Qassim Yehyah, a Health Ministry spokesman.

 

The ministries of Iraq's Government have done as much to catalyse as to prevent the country's sectarian breakdown, with many departments becoming the personal fiefs of Shia and Sunni factions. Today's attack on the Shia-run Health Ministry comes just a week after a similar, broad-daylight raid on the Ministry of Higher Education, which is controlled by the largest group of Sunni MPs.

 

Around 60 employees of the Higher Education Ministry were kidnapped last week by gunmen wearing the uniforms and driving the vehicles of Iraqi police commandos, themselves thought to be connected to Iraq's Interior Ministry, which has been long-suspected of harbouring and sustaining Shia militias and death squads.

 

Today's attack, blamed on Sunni militants, raised questions over whether the Iraqi army, one of the few large institutions where Sunnis still retain powerful influence, was complicit. Mr al-Zamily, the Deputy Health Minister, accused the army of not stepping in to quell the assault.

 

"We called the army commanders to intervene and stop the gunmen from attacking us but we got no reply. There is a big conspiracy by terrorists to separate east and west Baghdad."

 

 

LEBANON prepares for civil war.

 

 

Thu. Nov. 23, 2006. | Updated at 03:05 AMSunny

H 9 / L 1

4 Day Forecast

 

Post-war exodus threatens country's future

BEIRUT—An estimated 100,000 people have packed up and left since the summer war in Beirut, the government says — even before Tuesday's slaying of Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel increased Lebanon's political tensions and led to more anxiety about the future.

 

Some fear the exodus is draining the best and brightest from this small country struggling toward full democracy.

 

"I had gotten it out my mind that there would be military confrontation again. But now I am back to my thinking that anything could happen at any time," said assistant university professor Carol Kfouri, a Canadian national. "I think a lot of people now are very wary again — and that's sad."

 

It's a sharp turnaround from the Lebanon of five years ago, when people were returning after the civil-war years, the economy was booming and the country's future looked bright.

 

And it's an eerie echo of both Lebanon's own troubled past and of the similar and highly damaging exodus of people from nearby war-torn Iraq.

 

Sociologists say the exodus of middle-class or affluent people can weaken both a country's economy and its social fabric.

 

Iraq is now short on doctors, engineers, business people and even poets and other artists — those most needed to rebuild that country physically and emotionally.

 

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Dark clouds over Lebanon

Anti-Syrians fear future is grim in wake of Christian minister's assassination

Nov. 23, 2006. 01:00 AM

ANDREW MILLS

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

 

 

BEkfaya, Lebanon—The followers of Lebanon's latest assassinated anti-Syrian politician retreated behind the tank soldiers positioned at their headquarters to mourn and prepare to take their fury to the streets of Beirut today.

 

"I am not confident the future will be peaceful," said Bashir Maroun, 27, who leads the anti-Syrian Phalange party in his nearby village.

 

The streets of Lebanon's Christian areas remained unusually quiet yesterday, an official day of mourning for slain 34-year-old Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel.

 

Today, legions of supporters of the anti-Syrian governing coalition are expected to heed their leaders' call to rally at Gemayel's funeral. Most institutions and businesses in the capital have closed in anticipation of giant protests amid Lebanon's tensest political crisis in years.

 

Yesterday afternoon, armoured convoys bearing the dignitaries of anti-Syrian factions rolled through this ancient village in the mountains above Beirut. They joined thousands of ordinary people on a pilgrimage to the ancestral home of the Gemayel political dynasty — Pierre Gemayel's grandfather Pierre, who founded the Phalange party in 1936; his son Bashir, elected president in 1982 but killed before he could take office; and Bashir's brother Amin (Pierre's father) who served Bashir's term and went into exile in 1988.

 

The throngs pushed through a stand of old cedar trees and beyond the home's cream-coloured stone archways. Inside, a choir of Maronite Catholic nuns chanted where Pierre Gemayel's body lay in a casket, cloaked with the green and white flag of the Phalange party.

 

The mourners pressed their hands to the casket. Some wailed. Others wept in quiet exhaustion.

 

"Look into my eyes and see exactly how I feel," said 27-year-old Fady Matta, his hands shaking. "We lost a hero. We lost our future."

 

Like many of Gemayel's grieving admirers, Maroun is ready to take action against those he blames for the murder: Damascus and its Lebanese allies, including the militant Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah.

 

"We have reached the end. It's either time to win or lose," he said as one woman's howls of grief filled the air. "There is no third way."

 

Hezbollah and its pro-Syria allies are calling for the ouster of the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Fouad Sinoria after it rebuffed their demands for a much more powerful role in the cabinet.

 

With its hand strengthened in Lebanon following this summer's 34-day war with Israel, Hezbollah had threatened to send thousands of its supporters into the streets as early as this week to demand the government's overthrow. But Gemayel's assassination boosted tensions between the two factions and emotions are running dangerously high, stoking fears that a massive pro-Syrian demonstration on the heels of today's funeral rally could result in violent clashes.

 

It remains unclear what Hezbollah's next step will be.

 

Syria and its allies deny involvement in Gemayel's killing, or in the slayings of four other prominent anti-Syrian figures killed here since the February 2005 assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. That event prompted massive demonstrations that led to Syria ending its indirect control of the Lebanese government and the withdrawal of Syrian soldiers after 29 years in Lebanon.

 

Yesterday, the Security Council approved a Lebanese government request for UN investigators to help probe Gemayel's murder. The UN is already investigating the Hariri killing.

 

"I expect more assassinations," anti-Syrian Druze leader Walid Jumblatt said yesterday, "but no matter what they do, we are here and will be victorious."

 

 

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Andrew Mills is a Canadian journalist based in Lebanon.