Baghdead

If what U.S. military flacks are saying today is true—that a terrorist "tortured and killed two innocent Iraqi civilians" and used their corpses as bait to blow up others—then for once I agree with them: Iraq is experiencing "a new level of barbarity."

According to Major Russell Goemaere, that's how a car bombing at 8 a.m. Sunday went down in the capital's New Baghdad district:

The bodies were discovered lying in the middle of the road. When Iraqi security forces and a crowd of civilians gathered near the scene, a terrorist drove his car bomb into the group and detonated it.

An Iraqi cop and the drive bomber were killed in the explosion, and five civilians and three Iraqi cops were wounded, according to Goemaere's Armed Forces Press Service account.

As of early Sunday afternoon, there were few other accounts of the New Baghdad incident, and none of the others had the bit about the corpses being used as bait.

Al Jazeera reports that 10 people were killed in new bombings this morning and adds this:

The first attack on Sunday killed two policemen and one civilian in the eastern New Baghdad neighbourhood, police 1st Lieutenant Muhammad Jasim said. Seven policemen and one civilian were also wounded, some seriously.

About an hour later a second car bomb exploded near a police convoy near the Bayaa bus station in southern Baghdad, killing three police commandos and four civilians, police Captain Talib Thamir said. Three civilians were also injured in that blast.

The BBC mentions corpses, but in another context, yesterday's nightmarish bombing south of Baghdad, in Musayyib, where the death toll has reached 90, with more than 150 injured. The BBC adds new detail about the fireball resulting from a drive bomber, strapped with explosives, running up to a fuel truck at a gas state/vegetable market and blowing himself up:

At the time, the streets were filled with cars and pedestrians, people coming out as the intense heat of the day subsided. The town centre has been devastated.

"I was 100 metres away when I saw the fireball. It was enormous. ... People were burning in their cars," witness Khodr Abbas told the AFP news agency. "I saw women in the burning houses crying for help and we couldn't do a thing."