Murdered for Buying Books

The latest bit of heroism from the Iraqi insurgency: a car bomb attack on a Baghdad book market:

Mutanabbi Street - named after a renowned classical Arabic poet - is an area of mixed Shia- and Sunni-owned businesses and customers.

A witness quoted by Reuters news agency said there were women and children among the casualties. People drove the injured to hospital in private cars without waiting for ambulances.

"There was so much smoke that I was vomiting," said the witness, who was in a bookshop when its windows were blown out by the blast.

"Papers from the book market were floating through the air like leaflets dropped from a plane," said Naim Daraji, a civil servant quoted by Associated Press.

"Pieces of flesh and the remains of books were scattered everywhere," he said.


Murdered people and destroyed books: truly symbolic of the future Iraq the jihadists have in mind.