Unemployed Iraqis as strategic targets of enemy

CNN:

A suicide bomber targeting laborers killed 60 people Tuesday in Baghdad and wounded 220 others, Iraqi officials said.

A pickup truck, loaded with about 440 pounds (200 kilograms) of explosives, pulled into Tayaran Square as hundreds of unemployed Iraqis holding picks and shovels gathered seeking a day's work.

The truck driver signaled to the would-be workers that he had jobs -- prompting people to crowd around the pickup before he detonated his bomb, said an Iraqi Interior Ministry official.

The explosion, which sent a cloud of black smoke into the sky, set several cars ablaze, and gunfire sounded after the blast, Reuters reported.

"A driver with a pickup truck stopped and asked for laborers. When they gathered around the car, it exploded," a witness told Reuters as he helped a stumbling survivor with a blood-stained head bandage.

"They were poor laborers looking for work. The poor are supposed to be protected by the government."

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called the attack a "horrible massacre," according to Reuters, blaming it on Saddam Hussein sympathizers and al Qaeda in Iraq.

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Note two things about this story that reflect what is wrong with news coverage from Iraq. There is no mention of the fact that the enemy attack was a war crime and violation of the Geneva Conventions by deliberately targeting non combatants and using people camouflaged as civilians in the attack. The second is the following of the enemy script by blaming the government for failing "to protect" the victims. No condemnation is made of the enemy for attacking non combatants. This is just typical of the faulty reporting on this war.