Iraqis Lose Hope 绝望的伊拉克人
As Afghanistan embraces the political process, there’s been little in the way good news to report from Iraqi. The past week has seen the worst violence in the capital, Baghdad since the downfall of Saddam Hussein. On Wednesday almost two-hundred people were killed in suicide car bombs and the following day saw further explosions and more deaths. But as the security forces continue to try to quell the insurgency, Kaline Holly finds many Iraqis lose hope for the future.
We were cowering in terror on the floor of the car -- sheltering behind the armoured plates installed for exactly this kind of moment. Bullets were flying -- not from insurgents though but from policemen shooting wildly in the air after a bomb had just gone off behind us. One of 11 in different parts of Baghdad on Wednesday. And if it’s been 30 seconds earlier it would have been us in the middle of that cloud of dust and smoke.
It'd been a deafening explosion -- much too close for comfort. I didn't feel it at the time, my nerves were too jangled, but we were lucky. So often it's people just going about their daily business, who are caught up and killed in bombs that go off every day somewhere in Iraq.
And we saw that day just what damage a car-full of carefully-packed explosives can do. We'd come from Oruba square in the Kazimiya neighbourhood where at 8 o'clock on Wednesday morning, a suicide bomber drove into a crowd of construction workers waiting for jobs, killing more than a hundred people. Many were literally ripped to shreds, human flesh scattered over the square. In the chaos after the explosion, bodies -- or what was left of them -- were carried unceremoniously on wooden crates usually used for market produce and dumped on the backs of trucks.
Survivors said the bomber had actually lured his victims closer to them by offering them work, some were clambering into his minivan when he set off the bomb. And it was no accident he'd chosen Kazimiya, A Shiite district. Later that same day an audiotape emerged apparently from Iraq's most wanted man, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, threatening all out war on the Shiites.
