Terrorism escalated in Iraq today, with a newly sharpened focus on anti-Christian violence.
Car bombs exploded outside at least five Christian churches in Iraq on Sunday, killing more than a dozen people and wounding many more in an apparently coordinated attack timed to coincide with evening prayers."We are expecting a huge number of casualties," an Interior Ministry source told Reuters, saying there had been four blasts at churches in Baghdad and two in the northern city of Mosul. Police in Mosul said they knew of just one church attack there.
In the deadliest attack, a suicide car bomber drove into the car park of a Chaldean church in southern Baghdad before detonating his vehicle, killing at least 12 people as worshippers left the building, witnesses said.
Violence against Assyrian Christians and other Christian groups in Iraq is nothing new since the U.S.-led invasion, but today was dramatically worse in scope.
Alaa at Iraqi blog The Messopotamian is outraged.
What can we say? One is speechless, numb, shocked, bleeding internally, and angry; oh, so angry, never been angrier in a whole lifetime.Whoever did this and whoever organized and financed this; whoever remotely tries to find excuses and justification for this, whoever even keeps quiet or is indifferent to this here and everywhere, in the East or in the West; must be pronounced excommunicate from membership of the sensible human race. All those calling for retreat and submitting to the intimidation of these monstrous zombies are traitors and cowards and will not reap but their own destruction when horror comes to their own front doors. Those who think that turning their backs and escaping the confrontation to barricade themselves in their secluded islands, is going to save their skins, are in profound and fatal delusion.
The horror will come to your own cities and your own houses. The time to fight is now and here; and the security of the Iraqis and your own security is one and indivisible.
Humans of the World: Remember.
Israeli intel site DEBKA says the strikes were pure al Qaeda, coordinated to coincide with threats against Italy and to show Sunni Baathists who might be tempted to negotiate with the U.S. and Interim PM Alawi that Iraq is a jihadist battleground, nothing else.
Al Qaeda’s assault on Iraq’s Christian churches – the first attack suffered by the Christian minority since the fall of Saddam Hussein – underlined the seriousness of the threat al Qaeda’s al Masri Brigades issued against Italy that very morning, Sunday, August 1 in the London Arabic publication, al Quds al-Araby.The threat to Italy is addressed to prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and gives him 15 days to withdraw his troops from Iraq or endure attack. Operational squads were already roaming through Rome and other cities primed for action, according to the published warning.
On Sunday, the fundamentalist terror organization was at pains to demonstrate its power to torpedo any deal the Baath-Sunni side might strike with Washington by ever-more horrendous terrorist attacks against Iraqis to put paid to any chances of stabilizing the country. Neither the Americans nor prime minister Iyad Allawi would manage, moreover, to evict the terrorist group from the country. Al Qaeda was in Iraq to stay.
The fundamentalists were cracking the whip to punish their Iraqi allies for another unforgivable sin: the new guidelines the Baath leadership recently issued guerrilla commanders, which stressed that the Baath rather than al Qaeda was the driving force of the anti-US insurgency and, furthermore, that the nature of the struggle was national rather than religious. Al Qaeda was not denied a role in the struggle, the commanders were told, only a say in charting Iraq’s future.
Al Qaeda had no intention of letting the Baath get away with this; Sunday it unsheathed its claws against fellow Iraqis partly to put the Sunni Baath in its place.
DEBKA is often alarmist and wrong, but this seems plausible. However, there's just no way to know (yet) if their statements about negotiations supposedly underway now are true or not.
Posted by Alan at August 1, 2004 05:41 PM