Iraq Mortar Attack Kills 9, Wounds 15 (non-US)

[underpants]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/iraq



BAQOUBA, Iraq - A mortar shell apparently intended for U.S. troops hit a market, killing nine civilians and wounding 15, Iraqi police reported Friday, while the U.S. military said a soldier was killed in an ambush at Kirkuk in the oil-rich north of the country.

The mortar round exploded in Baqouba, a restive Sunni Muslim city about 30 miles north of Baghdad, at about 9 p.m. Thursday. Police Gen. Waleed Khalid put the death toll at nine civilians with 15 wounded. U.S. officials said the wounded numbered 18.

A U.S. military commander said he thought the attackers were trying to hit an American base about 300 yards south of the market.

[catmandu57]

1. Finding the range

Add these dead to gw's* tab. He's going to have a ponderous heavy chain isn't he.

[efhmc]

2. Doesn't count , not americans. (That's, of course, not my opinion.)

Can you tell me where there is an accounting of civilians lives lost that has some degree of accuracy? Thanks.

[underpants]

3. This site says ~1,500 more than "usual" and ~20,000 injured

http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

[efhmc]

6. Can you do a thread on that site? There are accounting of individual

events. It makes me so very very sad and sick. I really really hate that smirking cowardly weasel that thinks he is the president.

[malachi]

4. Non-US

I'm curious to see how many responses you get to this post with the above cited phrase attached in the subject line.

[underpants]

5. I was going to put a line above the link

because I thought people might jump on me for possibly implying that that makes it less important. It doesn't and I didn't.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

7. NYT Report on the same incident.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/international/middleeast/27IRAQ.html?ex=1065240000&en=1228614e6be74daa&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

AQUBA, Iraq, Sept. 26 — A mortar shell crashed down in the cool of early evening here on Thursday, killing at least seven Iraqis — a peddler chatting with his brother, the owners of the local computer store, a pair of sheep sellers from the north — in a town square. At least 20 people were wounded. It was the third fatal attack in recent weeks by mortars — whose powerful and portable shells are questionably accurate but, when they hit, do so lethally. They are also believed to be plentiful in Iraq, and so, a potentially growing threat to American forces and Iraqi civilians.

"One hundred percent, it's effective," Muhammad Jabbar, 42, a former artilleryman in the Iraqi army and so an expert on the weapons, said as he stood in the newly pocked square here today. "You know, the bomb breaks into fragments. It kills people, penetrates their bodies and kills more people."

The police in this town north of Baghdad said today the attackers — apparently firing one 120 millimeter round — may have been aiming for a base of American soldiers several hundred yards away.

"Why do they kill Iraqis?" asked one man here. "They are not resisters. They only pretend to be resisters."
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