A selected item because it puts the lie to the "sectarianism" of Iraq.
Yup, lived together and inter-married for thousands of years did Shi'ites and Sunnis things didn't blow up -- until the U.S. got there!!!
STINK!!!
What it meant to Iraqis:
"
BAGHDAD, April 12 — There is not much left in Baghdad that all its residents, Sunnis and Shiites, laborers and professors, consider their own. But the Sarafiya bridge, flung across the Tigris, tied the city together, literally and metaphorically.
When the bridge was destroyed early Thursday morning by a truck bomb that collapsed a large section into the river, Baghdad mourned. People who had crossed the bridge every day to go to their jobs on the opposite side gathered on the riverbanks and stood weeping as if they had lost someone they loved.
More people have died in many other bombings, but the destruction of the bridge struck at the city’s soul, at its lingering romance with an all but vanished image of Baghdad as a Paris of the Middle East.
Now WHO would want to do that, readers, and WHY?
The steel bridge, which spans a stretch of river about 500 yards wide, was built by a British company at a time when foreigners from all over the world came to the city to study and work. Construction started in 1946, and it was completed in 1951, while the British-installed monarchy was in place. Built to accommodate train tracks as well as a roadway for cars, the bridge linked Baghdad’s two main rail stations and was one of the city’s main transit points across the Tigris.
And if you were fighting an insurgency that had no helicopters, etc, whom would this help?
CUI BONO?
Just as good as a slab of concrete wall, isn't it?
CUI BONO, readers?
Most of the city is divided now, with the west bank of the Tigris predominantly Sunni and the east side predominantly Shiite. But so far the neighborhoods on either side of the Sarafiya bridge have been spared the worst of the violence, and both are still mixed as so much of the city once was.
Putting the LIE to SECTARIANISM!
Every Baghdadi seemed to have a memory of the bridge on Thursday.
An engineer for the General Committee for Trains and Bridges remembered coming to the city from the country as a child and standing in awe before the marvelous bridge. “I used to walk nearby the bridge along with my cousins dazzled to see the train moving on the track, puffing out the smoke backward,” he said.
An Iraqi reporter described crossing it to go to art school every day. “Sometimes alone or with a girlfriend,” he said. “Sometimes I used to spend hours looking at the river from above.”
Riyadh Yosif, a day laborer who walked across the bridge to look for work in the industrial area on the other side of the river each morning, described feeling utter shock when he rushed out after he heard the bomb. “We went out to see what happened, and the bridge, which I loved so much, I found was destroyed.”
That just brought some water from me!
He began to cry. “I wish they had killed one of my children rather than destroying the bridge, which I consider part of my heart.
“This bridge is so important to us. We cross it every day to look for work. What shall we do now? They have destroyed us as well.”
What happened at the bridge:"
BAGHDAD, April 12 — In a traumatic attack early in the day, a truck bomb destroyed the beloved 60-year-old Sarafiya bridge across the Tigris and killed six people. The heavily traveled bridge has long been a symbol of Baghdad, illustrated on old postcards and drawings from a more peaceful time....
Baghdad residents were horrified by news of the bridge bombing, a demoralizing attack that stole one of the few remaining reminders of better days in the capital.
The Saddam times?
The bomber drove a tanker truck loaded with explosives onto the bridge at 7 a.m. and brought it to a halt midway, according to American military officials and witnesses. The driver examined the truck’s underside and then disappeared. With the truck blocking traffic, motorists stopped a police patrol crossing the bridge and asked them to do something about it.
Immediately suspicious, the police moved cars and people off the bridge and radioed to the patrols on the opposite side to stop people from starting across. One witness, a tractor driver, described a policeman opening the passenger door of the truck, seeing a mass of wires and batteries, and running away.
Ten minutes later (?) the bomb exploded, so powerfully that it killed six people some distance away, sent several cars careening into the river and destroyed 65 percent to 75 percent of the steel structure....
Police blamed a suicide truck bomber for the attack... AP Television News video, however, showed the bridge broken in two places -- the result of two blasts."
That's some "suicider," huh? Sniff-sniff, oh!
Wafting shitstink of a western-intel black-op!
Occupation Iraq: Israeli-Trained Death Squads
Salvador Option
Special Police Commandos
Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group
Prop 201 tutorial
FRU
How much more evidence do you need, readers?
This?
I've also noticed that my language was WORSE a year ago at this time, readers.
I know that seems hard to believe, but it's true.
I wouldn't lie to you like AmeriKa's MSM, readers.
