WaPo: Weeping relatives loaded simple wood coffins atop minivans Saturday in Baghdad as the city buried dozens of victims of the deadliest bombings
February 1, 2008

WaPo:

Weeping relatives loaded simple wood coffins atop minivans Saturday in Baghdad as the city buried dozens of victims of the deadliest bombings since the U.S. flooded the capital with extra troops last spring.

Iraqi officials raised the death toll of Friday's attacks to at least 99 _ including 62 people killed at the central al-Ghazl market and 37 others killed about 20 minutes later across town, at the New Baghdad area pigeon market. The Iraqi police, hospital and Interior Ministry officials all spoke on customary condition of anonymity.

At least 88 people were wounded in al-Ghazl, and 56 others in the second blast, they said.

Two mentally disabled women strapped with remote-control explosives _ and possibly used as unwitting suicide bombers _ brought carnage to the two pet bazaars, in attacks Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said sought to "turn Baghdad back to the pre-surge period."

E&P points out that this is not the first time that the media has claimed that suicide bombers are mentally disabled with little evidence. That, to me, is troubling. Suicide bombing is horrifying enough, but it adds another shade of demonization to the meme of the backwards 7th century Muslims to insinuate that they are callously using the mentally disabled to do their dirty work.

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