Iraq Suicide Bomber Kills 24

[WhiteTara]

Source: NYT

BAGHDAD — Twenty-four Iraqi pro-government tribal leaders who were meeting at the house of a Sunni sheikh to discuss national reconciliation efforts were killed on Friday when a suicide bomber walked inside and detonated an explosive vest, government officials said. The meeting included Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds and as many as 21 others were wounded, the officials said.

Fatality reports ranged as high as a total of 30 people killed in the bombing, with a further 110 wounded, though those numbers could not immediately be confirmed.

The attack took place in the town of Yusufiyah, about 25 miles southwest of Baghdad in an area referred to as the Triangle of Death because it had once been at the center of the insurgency against United States forces in Iraq and was a region where Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni extremist group that American intelligence agencies say is led by foreigners, had been active.

snip

The meeting at the house of the sheikh, Mohammed Abdullah Saleh, comprised 700 to 800 people from around Iraq who were members of the Qaraghul tribe. The tribe includes Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

The local leaders were sitting in the sheikh’s spacious backyard to eat lunch and discuss issues in preparation for a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki when guards at a checkpoint stopped a man before he could enter the backyard, witnesses said. Once stopped, he apparently detonated himself, they said.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/03/world/middleeast/03iraq.html?_r=1&ref=world

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edited for oopsie

[patrice]

1. !

:cry:

[Soylent Brice]

2. yeah, but what we really want to know is

what fashions the new Palin family addition will be wearing this spring.

:sarcasm: