THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

What does it matter? When the dust settles they are all dead. From the AP:

The Baghdad bombing occurred Sunday when a suicide driver detonated a minivan in the Mahdi Army stronghold of Sadr City at the entrance to the Jameelah market, which was packed with shoppers and vendors on the first day of the Iraqi workweek.

An Iraqi army statement said 34 people were killed and 73 were wounded. Eight more people were killed and 20 wounded when a second bomb exploded two hours later at a municipal government building in Sadr City, the Iraqi army said.

In Kirkuk, a car bomb detonated at midday near a courthouse in the city market district, killing 20 and wounding more than 150, according to police Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir. It was the fourth car bombing this month in Kirkuk, where tensions are rising among Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen for control of the area's vast oil wealth.

Numbers getting to be too much? Try this instead.

"We could not sleep because of the raid, and today we woke up with the explosion of the car bomb," one man told Associated Press Television without giving his name. "How long is it going to be like this?"

Police searched through the wreckage of the car bomb for more victims and warned bystanders to leave or they would be arrested. An elderly man, his clothes soaked in blood, wept as he called out the name of a missing relative.

And in the other Middle East war it continues as before.

Israel hit the southern port of Sidon for the first time, destroying a religious complex linked to Hezbollah and wounding four people. More than 35,000 people streaming north from the heart of the war zone had swamped the city, which is teetering under the weight of refugees.

Israel also bombed a textile factory in the border town of al-Manara, killing one person and wounding two, Mayor Ali Rahal told The Associated Press.

The stricken minibus was carrying 16 people fleeing the village of Tairi, heading through the mountains for the southern port city of Tyre. A missile hit the bus near the village of Yaatar, killing three and wounding the rest, security officials said.

On Saturday, the Israeli military told residents of Taire and 12 other nearby villages to evacuate by 4 p.m.

In other violence, an 8-year-old boy was killed in a strike on a village in the mountains above Tyre, and another missile hit a vehicle right outside the Najem hospital, wounding eight, a hospital official said.....

....At least four other people were killed by strikes in the south, Lebanese television said, but the deaths were not confirmed by security officials.[Does that mean they are not really dead?-M] About 45 people were wounded in Israeli air raids that targeted villages and towns around Tyre, security and hospital officials said.

And somewhere there are people congratulating themselves for a job well done.