Juan Cole - 11/20/05

More than 50 Dead in Saturday Bombings

Guerrillas killed 5 GIs and wounded 5 others in Baiji on Saturday with roadside bombs.

They also blew up a market in southern Baghdad near the Diyalah Bridge, killing 13 and wounding 20.

At a funeral in a town northeast of Baghdad for a man killed by suicide bombings on Friday, suicide bombers struck again, killing 35. The Scotsman reports: "Ambulances streamed into the main hospital in Baqouba ferrying the wounded. But the facilities were so crowded that dazed and bloodied survivors lay in agony in the hallways because of the backlog. Doctors and nurses rushed from stretcher to stretcher trying to determine who needed surgery first."

Conversation between a Sunni Muslim and a SCIRI Leader

Gilbert Achcar kindly writes:

"AN EXCHANGE BETWEEN SUNNI MUSLIMS AND A SCIRI LEADER

On the occasion of the Iraqi conference to be held in Cairo under the auspices of the League of Arab states, IslamOnline—a website related to the pan-Islamic (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood—invited Dr. Ali al-Adad, a prominent member of the [Shiite] Central Council of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), to a live exchange with its readers in one of the online discussions that the website organizes regularly on very diverse issues. The exchange took place on November 17, and is posted in Arabic on IslamOnline.net.