November off to bloody start in Iraq
(AP)Updated: 2006-11-03 08:41
The rigged motorcycle was left in a section of the market that specialized in the sales of secondhand motorbikes and spare parts. Videotape by Associated Press Television News in the aftermath of the bombing showed the mangled skeletons of scores of motorbikes and large pools of blood on the ground.
Gheith Jassim al-Saadi, a 36-year-old laborer, arrived at the scene shortly after the blast. He had planned to go to the market earlier to have two friends repair his motorbike.
"Motorcycles were scattered everywhere, blood was on the ground and crowds of people were looking for their relatives in panic," he said. "I do not know what happened to my two friends."
Mahdi Army militiamen, who control the district, arrived quickly to disperse a crowd of onlookers, fearing a second blast targeting rescuers and police as has repeatedly been the case in past bombings.
The slain university dean, Jassim al-Asadi, a Shiite, was returning home after picking up his son from school and his wife from her teaching job, when gunmen drove alongside and sprayed his car with automatic weapons, police Lt. Ahmed Ibrahim said. Al-Asadi's wife and son also were killed, Ibrahim said.
With his death, at least 155 educators have perished since the war began. The academics apparently were singled out for their relatively high public stature, vulnerability and known views on controversial issues in a climate of deepening Islamic fundamentalism.
The savagery against professionals is robbing Iraq of much of its brain trust. The Health Ministry says at least 250 physicians and health workers have been killed since March 2003 and more than 6,000 doctors have fled the country.
As with most murders in Iraq, al-Asadi's killers were unlikely to be captured, leaving their motive a mystery. But he was slain four days after the assassination of a prominent Sunni academic, matching the pattern of tit-for-tat sectarian revenge killings that have shredded Iraqi society.
Geologist Essam al-Rawi, head of the University Professor's Union and a senior member of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, was gunned down as he left his Baghdad home Monday. The scholars association has links to the Sunni insurgency.
Two Iraqi lawmakers, meanwhile, said the prime minister planned to reshuffle his 39-member Cabinet in a bid to salvage the government's faltering image and deflect criticism that it is ineffective in stopping the sectarian killing, providing services and creating jobs.
"It will cover about a third of the serving ministers, including one with a security brief," Ali al-Adeeb, a lawmaker of al-Maliki's Dawa Party and a close aide to the prime minister, told the AP.
Hassan al-Suneid, another Dawa lawmaker and al-Maliki confidant, said he expects the Cabinet changes within a month. "It will take place after consultations with the political blocs in parliament," he said.
The US military said a Baghdad-based soldier was killed Wednesday in a roadside bombing, a second died Monday in a firefight in the capital and a third died Thursday from an unspecified non-combat incident north of the capital, raising to 2,820 the number of US forces who have died in the war.
Also Thursday, the US military identified a kidnapped soldier as Ahmed Qusai al-Taayie, 41, of Ann Arbor, Mich. His identity had been widely published after an Iraqi woman, who said she was his mother-in-law, provided the name and said he was married three months ago to her daughter, a Baghdad college student.
Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell confirmed widely published reports that the reserve soldier was handcuffed and taken away by gunmen during a visit to his wife's family October 23.
But Caldwell said that the soldier and his wife were "married in February 2005 and he didn't arrive in theater until November 2005. So he has every right, of course, as an American soldier to marry whomever he wants. ... At the time he was abducted his wife was in country here, in Baghdad."
The spokesman said the United States believed the soldier was still in the custody of his abductors and there was "an ongoing dialogue" to win the his release. He did not say with whom or at what level.
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