Saturday, December 20, 2003

Just another day at the office:

U.S. troops mistakenly shot and killed three Iraqi police officers and wounded two others, thinking they were bandits, an Iraqi police officer said Saturday....

...Friday night, Iraqi police shot and wounded two people they said were trying to place roadside bombs on a route used by the U.S. army around al-Hawija, a town 15 miles west of Kirkuk.

Meanwhile in Najaf, gunmen attempted to assassinate Damiyah Abbas, a provincial party official believed to have participated in the repression of a 1991 Shiite uprising against the government of Saddam, who violently repressed Iraq's Shiite majority.

Police initially said she had died in the attack, as she was leaving her home, then said she was hospitalized in critical condition. Her 5-year-old son was killed instantly, they said.

Another Baath party official accused in the repression was lynched by an angry crowd and killed on Wednesday in Najaf, 100 miles southwest of Baghdad.

...On Friday, an explosion destroyed a west Baghdad branch office of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, the biggest party supported by Shiites, who comprise about 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people and who were brutally repressed by Saddam.

Rahim Jaber said the pre-dawn blast killed his elderly sister, who was sleeping when the roof of their home collapsed, and injured seven other people. The front part of the one-story building was a party office -- some said an office of the party's armed militia -- and the back was occupied by people made homeless when the United States invaded.

Meanwhile tempers in Baghdad frayed as a gasoline shortage reached critical proportions in Baghdad. Mile-long lines of cars and 12-hour waits for fuel were common....


--AP/MSNBC

About those attacks on Baathists: I don't weep when Saddam loyalists suffer, but I suspect we're going see a lot more of that kind of thing now that Saddam is in custody. This could turn into a classic civil war, couldn't it?

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