Happy four years, American-occupied Iraq!

Four. Seems that the poor number is slowly going to replace ‘13’ as being the most creepy number in our world...
Well, it already is for the Japanese: the pronunciation of 4 in Japanese (which reads ‘shi’) is a homophone to ‘death’.

And for us, well, four years is...
The American presidential mandate! (Hehehehe. :)

And now, it’s the age of the American invasion of Iraq.

I won't go into how awful the war is, how the medical magazine ‘The Lancet’ published an article on 11 October 2006 estimating 654,965 excess deaths related to the war, or 2.5% of the population, through the end of June 2006.
That’s about two thirds of a million.

So in commemoration of this lovely day, I won’t go on to describe how the country is in a civil war.
Naaah. You know that stuff. I’ll just report an article that was published in BBC News today:

'Children used' in Iraq bombing

According to US Army General Michael Barbero, two adults driving a car managed to get through a checkpoint because they had 2 kids in the car. The adults then parked the car and took off - and the car exploded.

WITH THE KIDS INSIDE.

Holy fuck.

Is this where we are now? I assume the children were kidnapped. But why would someone do that?? Not that all those bombing maniacs cared about civilians, children, or women or anything.

But to actually kidnap kids, lock them inside a bomb and press the button is... I don’t know. Beyond my imagination?

It’s just... it’s appalling! How could someone possibly do that?

And am I the only one who thinks this is a new level of cruelty that is beginning in Iraq?

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An interesting page, again from the BBC: Animated map of city's attacks and ethnic divisions since 2003. It's scary. Ceck out the ethnic distribution of the city.