I couldn't find the outrage meter graphic.BAGHDAD, IRAQ - A suicide attacker steered a car packed with explosives toward U.S. soldiers giving away toys to children outside a hospital in central Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 31 people. Almost all of the victims were women and children, police said.
The Lions of Islam™ strike again.
In all, 53 people were killed in bombings and by gunfire across the country, including two American soldiers who died in a roadside bombing near Baghdad. The U.S. military also reported three American troops were killed in roadside bombings the previous day.
Iraqi security officials said they thought Iraqi police or the U.S. forces were the target of the bombing Thursday, which took place outside the general hospital in Mahmoudiya. The town has a mixed Shiite and Sunni Arab population and is in an area south of Baghdad known as the Triangle of Death. One Iraqi police officer was among the dead, said Capt. Muthana Ahmad, a police spokesman in Babil province. Four American troops participating in the toy giveaway were wounded, the Iraqis said. With no room left inside the hospital, emergency workers rushed victims to hospitals 20 miles north in Baghdad. And with no room left in the hospital morgue, the workers were forced to place the dead in the hospital garden so family members could find them.
Ahmad said late Thursday that an Iraqi parliament member, Jafar Muhammad, was among the dead. His death would bring to three the number of National Assembly members killed in insurgent attacks. In Baghdad on Thursday, a spokesman for the interim government warned that violence, particularly against Iraqi soldiers and police, would probably accelerate ahead of the Dec. 15 elections to elect Iraq's first permanent postwar government.