Iraq--More Than a Political Issue
Don't forget the human suffering


My co-blogger has already noted the attack on two Shiite mosques, killing 70 and wounding 100. That was only one of the recent incidents making life a nightmare in Iraq. We should never forget the human costs in Iraqi lives and security. The numbers keep coming so fast that eventually they lose their power to move. Read Mosque Attacks Kill 70 in Iraq; Hotel Is Hit, Too for more. Below are a few excerpts:

Hours earlier, two suicide truck bombs struck a hotel in downtown Baghdad that houses many foreign journalists, killing at least 6 Iraqis and wounding more than 40. A neighboring apartment building crumbled to the ground in a plume of dust.

The assault at the Hamra Hotel, perhaps the most heavily populated residence for foreigners outside the fortified Green Zone, was the latest strike in a growing jihadist campaign against virtually any foreign presence here. At least two dozen major Western news organizations have offices at the Hamra.

The attack on the mosques was the deadliest in the country since a triple truck bombing on Sept. 29 in the Shiite town of Balad claimed a similar number of victims. No one took immediate responsibility for the Khanaqin attack, but the operation resembled those carried out by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the militant group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Another group, Ansar al-Sunna, often strikes at Kurds with suicide bombings.

Let's all hope that things turn out better than the facts suggest. The Iraqi people have suffered enough without enduring a bloody civil war. The treatment of Sunni prisoners by Shiite officials is more evidence of future problems.

The sectarian nature of the killings highlighted the growing divide between ethnic and religious groups in Iraq, even as the country moves toward elections in December for a full, four-year government. The split between the majority Shiites and the Sunni Arabs, who ruled under Saddam Hussein, widened this week after American soldiers discovered 169 malnourished detainees, virtually all Sunni Arabs, in a secret police center in Baghdad that is operated by the Shiite-run Interior Ministry. One witness to the American raid said at least a third of the detainees had bruises or cuts on their faces and bodies. The senior United Nations human rights official, Louise Arbour, called Friday for an international inquiry into incidents of torture at the prison. The suicide bombings on Friday, and one on Nov. 11 in a Baghdad restaurant that killed 29 people, have underscored questions about whether the American military has a coherent strategy for curbing such violence.