Progress!!

Here's today's carnage report from Iraq, via the NY Times. Another Violent Day Kills at Least 50 in Baghdad.

BAGHDAD, July 11 — At least 50 people were killed in Baghdad today in a stunning array of violence that included a double suicide attack near busy entrances to the fortified Green Zone, beheadings, shootings, a series of car bombs, mortar attacks and the ambush of a bus carrying Shiite mourners returning from a burial.

The day’s killings, many of them clearly carried out as sectarian vengeance, raised the three-day death toll in the capital alone to well over 100, and deepened the sense among residents that the violence was not going to ebb anytime soon — and that Iraqi and American security forces were powerless to stop it.

While responsibility was claimed for only one of today’s attacks, many bore the hallmarks of sectarian militias, both Sunni Arab and Shiite, which now appear to be dictating the ebb and flow of life in Iraq and that have left the new government of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and his American counterparts scrambling to come up with a military and political strategy to combat them.

Let's review a few of the day's events (from the NY Times article) :

• In today’s most deadly attack, two pedestrians wearing vests fashioned with explosives blew themselves up near a restaurant outside the walls of the Green Zone yet within a few hundred yards of three busy entrances, Iraqi and American officials said. Soon after the initial blasts, a hidden bomb was detonated nearby, adding to the carnage, officials said. At least 15 Iraqi civilians and one Iraqi police officer were killed in the blasts.

• In a predominantly Sunni area of the Dora district in southern Baghdad, gunmen ambushed a bus carrying Shiites mourners from the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where they had buried a relative, government officials and relatives said. The gunmen pulled 10 people from the bus and executed them, according to an Interior Ministry official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

• An hour earlier, in Taji, north of Baghdad, gunmen ambushed another bus, killing one person and wounding five, the ministry official said.

• Two mortar grenades hit a Shiite mosque in Dora, killing 9 and wounding 11 civilians, the Interior Mnistry official said.

• In other violence, a family of five — a father and mother and their grown daughter and two teenage sons — were found beheaded in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Mahdiya in Dora, according to an official at Yarmouk Hospital, the main medical facility in western Baghdad.

• The police and hospital officials also reported that four car bombs around Baghdad killed at least 7 people and wounded at least 18.

• Gunmen raided a company’s offices in the upper middle class Mansour neighborhood, killing three employees and wounding another three, officials said.

• According to the official at Yarmouk Hospital, five bodies were discovered early today in Jihad, the neighborhood where dozens of people were reportedly executed by marauding gunmen on Sunday.

• Wisam Jabir Abdullah, Iraq’s envoy to Iran, who was on vacation in Baghdad, was kidnapped by gunmen from his home today, the Interior Ministry official said.

• In Baquba, north of Baghdad, the mayor of the Um Al Nawa district was assassinated by gunmen, the ministry official said. In the Shiite holy city of Karbala, a drive-by shooting killed two workers in the central market, according to the Interior Ministry official.

• An engineer and his bodyguard were assassinated on their way to work in Kirkuk this morning, according to Col. Adel Zain Alabdin of the Iraqi Police.

I'm trying to imagine living in the middle of that horror and failing utterly.