This is really terrible. It looks like the murdering Americans have made a real mess of things in Baghdad. Again. AP:
BAGHDAD (AP) — Errant mortar shells slammed into houses and a funeral tent Wednesday, leaving three children among the dead during clashes in a Shiite militia stronghold under siege by American and Iraqi forces on the fifth anniversary of the U.S. capture of the capital.
The fighting came as the U.S. military announced the deaths of five more soldiers. That raised the number of American troop deaths to 17 since Sunday.
Many Iraqis said hopes that followed the U.S.-led ouster of Saddam Hussein have been quashed.
"On this day five years ago we were dreaming of a bright future, but now we know that our dream has turned into a long nightmare," said Khalid Ibrahim, a 45-year-old teacher from the mainly Sunni area of Azamiyah.
Not only did the Americans quash everyone's hopes, they're killing children.
Hold on a sec. Scroll down 16 paragraphs:
At 10 a.m., two mortar shells apparently fired by suspected Shiite extremists against the security forces fell short and instead struck a funeral tent and a house, killing seven people including three children, and wounding 27, according to police and hospital officials.
Hey, it was Shiite militiamen who killed those children. I never would have guessed if, like 90 percent of readers, I didn't make it past a lot of warmed-over America-bashing doom-and-gloom boilerplate to graph 16.
According to the AP, the Shiites killed the children accidentally because their aim was off. It doesn't say how the AP knows that. I don't think the AP was embedded with those Shiites, or that the AP would know its azimuths well enough to know what the Shiites intended to hit, even if it was embedded with those Shiite mortarmen. Nice of the AP to make excuses, but the Shiites meant to terrorize that neighborhood. Or maybe those Shiites are in fact grossly incompetent and have no business firing off mortars. In either case it sounds like Moqtada al-Sadr needs to call a board of inquiry or a court martial or something and get to the bottom of this. At the very least, issue a fatwa. And how come the AP doesn't have any quotes from anyone condemning those Shiite killers? They never seem to have any trouble finding them when they report on the Americans killing people accidentally on purpose.
Now, that has me thinking about the other not-so-subtle message in this story, that the Americans quashed everyone's hopes. Maybe the Shiite militias, and al-Qaeda for that matter, had something to do with it, the hope quashing. With all those errant carbombs and errant summary executions. I'm pretty sure the Shiite militias had something to do with the heat on Sadr City, with a week's worth of heavy rocket barrages that finally get a passing mention even farther down. Also, I'm curious why the AP always refers to "U.S.-bacekd Iraqi troops," instead of just calling them "Iraqi troops," but doesn't call the Shiite militias "Iranian-backed Shiite militias." It's a mystery, one of many in this story.