Nearly 90 Killed In Attacks Across Iraq

Business Insider
Ahmed Rasheed

At least 89 people were killed in bomb and gun attacks in Iraq on Monday after 20 died in blasts the previous day in a coordinated surge of violence against mostly Shi'ite Muslim targets.

The bloodshed coincided with an intensifying of the conflict in neighboring Syria.

As well as the dozens of deaths at least 223 people were wounded in bomb attacks in Shi'ite areas of Baghdad, the Shi'ite town of Taji to the north, the mixed northern city of Kirkuk and elsewhere, hospital and police sources said, making it one of Iraq's bloodiest days in weeks.

No group has claimed responsibility for the latest wave of assaults but a senior Iraqi security official blamed the local wing of al Qaeda, made up of Sunni Muslim militants hostile to the Shi'ite-led government, which is friendly with Iran.

"Recent attacks are a clear message that al Qaeda in Iraq is determined to spark a bloody sectarian war," the official said, asking not to be named.

"With what's going on in Syria, these attacks should be taken seriously as a potential threat to our country. Al Qaeda is trying to push Iraq to the verge of Shi'ite-Sunni war," he said. "They want things to be as bad as in Syria."

The last two days of bombings and shootings shattered a two-week lull in violence in the run-up to the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, which started in Iraq on Saturday.

Sectarian slaughter peaked in 2006-2007 but deadly attacks have persisted while political tensions among Iraq's main Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish factions have mounted since U.S. troops left the country in December.

TRAIL OF DESTRUCTION

In Taji, 20 km (12 miles) north of Baghdad, six explosions, including a car bomb, went off near a housing complex. A seventh blast there caused carnage among police who had arrived at the scene of the earlier ones. In all 32 people were killed, including 14 police, and 48 wounded, 10 of them police.

Two car bombs struck near a government building in Sadr City, a vast, poor Shi'ite swathe of Baghdad, and in the mainly Shi'ite area of Hussainiya on the outskirts of the capital, killing a total of 11 people and wounding 73, police said.

In Kirkuk, five car bombs killed six people and wounded 17, while explosions and gun attacks on security checkpoints around the restive province of Diyala killed six people, including four soldiers and policemen, and wounded 30, police sources said.

Two car bombs parked near a military checkpoint killed five people and wounded 22 in the town of Khan Bani Saad, 30 km (20 miles) northeast of Baghdad, police sources said. Gunmen killed four soldiers and wounded five in an attack on a checkpoint in the town of Udhaim, 90 km north of the capital, they said.

The orchestrated spate of attacks followed car bombs on Sunday in two towns south of Baghdad and in the Shi'ite shrine city of Najaf that killed 20 people and wounded 80.

Last month was one of the bloodiest since the U.S. withdrawal, with at least 237 people killed and 603 wounded.

Iraq, whose huge desert province of Anbar, a Sunni heartland, borders Syria, is nervous about the impact of the conflict raging in its neighbor, scene of a Sunni-led revolt against President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite-dominated rule.

Scientists Looked Inside The Brains Of Troops Killed By Bombs And Made This Shocking Discovery

Business Insider
Michael Kelley

Trauma from exposure to a single improvised explosive device (IED) blast can result in long-term brain impairment, according to new research.

The study, published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine, is the first to examine postmortem brains of U.S. military personnel who were exposed to a blast and/or a concussive injury.
It found evidence that a single blast from a typical IED can cause traumatic brain injury (TBI) and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

CTE is a progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in athletes and others with a history of repetitive brain trauma that leads to brain tissue death. Like TBI, which is considered to be its precursor, CTE results in psychiatric symptoms (e.g. personality changes, depression) and long-term cognitive disability (e.g. memory loss, impaired judgment, dementia).

The team of researchers — which included eminent CTE expert Dr. Ann McKee as well as leading experts in blast physics, experimental pathology and neurophysiology — investigated the brains of four military personnel with known blast exposure and compared them to brain tissue samples from four athletes who had a history of repetitive concussive injury and four comparably-aged people with no history of concussions or neurological disease.

The investigators found that the signs of CTE in the military veterans resembled those in the athletes and were consistent with brain samples from other athletes examined by McKee at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy in Massachusetts.


When examining the effects of a single blast exposure, they found that long-term impairments in brain functions were observed in mice just two weeks after exposure to a single blast.

In a press release, researchers estimated that TBI may affect 20 percent of the 2.3 million servicemen and women deployed since 2001.

More from the press release (via EurekAlert!):

"Our laboratory experiments show that blast exposure can produce both structural and functional damage that may be long-lasting and is likely to underlie the profound cognitive, memory, and perhaps mood and post-traumatic stress disorders, experienced by many soldiers," said [Dr. Patrick] Stanton, who is director of the Neural Systems Laboratory at [New York Medical College].

Researchers found that the blast wind from an IED — at a velocity of up to 330 miles per hour — as opposed to the shock wave leads to TBI and CTE, but immobilizing the head during blast exposure in mice prevented the learning and memory deficits associated with CTE.

Nevertheless, making sure the skull doesn't shake is easier said than done.

Dr. Lee Goldstein, associate professor at Boston University School of Medicine, stated that the results were encouraging to efforts concerned with the diagnosis and rehabilitation of traumatic brain injuries:
 

"Our study provides compelling evidence that blast TBI and CTE are structural brain disorders that can emerge as a result of brain injury on the battlefield or playing field," Goldberg said. "Now that we have identified the mechanism responsible for CTE, we can work on developing ways to prevent it so that we can protect athletes and our military service personnel."

Here's a YouTube video showing what it's like to be hit by an IED (via VideoblastViral):

Afghanistan civilian death toll has risen sharply, says United Nations

The Guardian
Peter Beaumont

In his last few weeks in charge of the Afghan war before taking the helm of the CIA, General David Petraeus and senior US officials have been talking up their progress.

The metrics of that success, perhaps unsurprisingly, have concentrated on the lethality of US and Nato operations.

From April to July this year – according to a briefing given to the Associated Press – 2,832 special forces raids have led to the deaths of 834 insurgents, while another 2,941 have been captured.
Because of this, according to Petraeus himself, violent attacks have fallen by 14% in 12 months.
"The [Taliban] have less capacity, they have been degraded somewhat," he told the New York Times. "This is the first real indicator – for the first time since 2006 – compared with the previous year, insurgent attack numbers are lower."

These would be impressive figures and claims except for one problem: the US military's figures are starkly contradicted by other sources.

For even as Petraeus was busy talking up his success earlier this month, the UN mission in Afghanistan was describing the course of the conflict in far more bleak and bloody terms.

Speaking on 14 July, Stefan de Mistura, special representative of the UN secretary general for Afghanistan, and his colleague Georgette Gagnon – director of human rights for the mission – described a 15% increase in civilian casualties in the preceding six months, with May 2011 the deadliest month of the war for civilians since 2007.

According to Gagnon (pdf): "The human cost of the Afghan conflict for Afghan civilians rose in the first six months of 2011.

"Afghan civilians experienced a 15% increase in conflict-related civilian deaths over the past six months compared with the same period in 2010."

She added: "This dramatic growth was mainly due to the use of landmine-like pressure plate improvised explosive devices or IEDs by anti-government elements.

"We at Unama [United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan] documented 1,462 civilian deaths for this period, with 80% attributed to anti-government elements, an increase of 28% in civilian deaths from the same period in 2010.

"A further 14% of civilian deaths over the last six months were attributed to the pro-government forces – this is the Afghan national security forces and international military forces."
These UN figures – and their contradiction of the official US military accounting – are important for three reasons.