More great news from Mess'o'potamia:
Shias from southern and central Iraq have begun travelling to Baghdad in answer to Muqtada al-Sadr's call for a "million man march" in support of Lebanon's Hezbollah.
Waving Iraqi flags and chanting "Death to America! Death to Israel", the demonstrators mounted convoys of buses and headed for the capital on Thursday, some of them wearing white shrouds symbolising their readiness to accept martyrdom.
The demonstration is to be held following Friday prayers in the teeming Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, home to some two million people, and comes at a tense time for the capital.
Tensions are already high as the Shi'a make their way to Baghdad.
The New York Times reports:
American troops opened fire today on a vehicle carrying armed Shiites to an anti-Israel demonstration in Baghdad, killing two occupants and wounding at least 16, officials said...
Meanwhile, in the Senate today, General Abazaid testified:
General John Abizaid, head of US Central Command, said that the violence in Iraq was "probably as bad as I've seen it" and that, if not stopped, the country would collapse into civil war...
..."I think it's possible that in the period ahead of us in Baghdad that we'll take increased casualties."
Net neutrality is apparently an issue in Iraq too. Our brothers and sisters of the Iraqi Blog Count report that following a spate of diaries expressing Anti-American and Anti-Israeli sentiments following the Qana deaths, there was an unexplained and lengthy denial of service to that website, where over 200 Iraqi bloggers post diaries.
Here's an excerpt from Riverbend's blog when she posted a diary on Qana:
I woke up this morning to scenes of carnage and destruction on the television and for the briefest of moments, I thought it was footage of Iraq. It took me a few seconds to realize it was actually Qana in Lebanon. The latest village to see Israeli air strikes. The images were beyond gruesome- body parts and corpses being hauled out from under tons of debris. Wailing relatives and friends, searching for loved ones... So far, according to humanitarian organizations, 34 were children. They killed them while they were sleeping inside their bomb shelters- much like the Amriya Shelter massacre in 1991.
We saw the corpses of the children on television, lifeless and twisted grotesquely, what remained of their faces frozen in expressions of pain and shock. I just sat there and cried in front of the television. I didn't know I could still feel that sort of sorrow towards what has become a daily reality for Iraqis. It's not Iraq but it might as well be: It's civilians under lethal attack; it's a country fighting occupation.
I'm so frustrated I can't think straight. I'm full of rage against Israel, the US, Britain, Iran and most of Europe. The world is going to go to hell for standing by and allowing the massacre of innocents. For God's sake, 34 children??? The UN is beyond useless...Are the lives of Arabs worth so little? If this had happened in the US or UK or France or China, somebody would already have dropped a nuclear bomb... How is this happening?
Where is the Security Council???