STRING OF BOMBINGS KILL AT LEAST 42 IN IRAQ

BOMBS ALSO CONTINUE TO STRIKE NEIGHBORHOODS
IN BAGHDAD DESPITE SECURITY GAINS

BAGHDAD – A double truck bombing tore through a Shiite community near the northern city of Mosul, while blasts in Baghdad targeted primarily Shiites in a wave of violence that killed at least 42 people, Iraqi officials said. The deadliest blast on Monday was a double truck bombing in Khazna village, just east of Mosul, as the members of a Shiite minority ethnic group called the Shabak, who live there, were still sleeping. Two explosives-laden trucks went off nearly simultaneously and less than 500 yards apart, killing at least 25 people and wounding 138, said a security official in Mosul. Nobody claimed responsibility for the attack, but it bore the hallmarks of al-Qaida in Iraq and other Sunni insurgents who remain active in Mosul and surrounding areas.

The first bomb Monday was hidden in a pile of trash when it exploded about 5:50 a.m. near a group of construction workers drinking tea and looking for day jobs in the religiously mixed neighborhood of Amil, killing at least seven people and wounding 46, officials said. About 10 minutes later a car bomb targeted construction workers elsewhere in western Baghdad, killing at least 10 people and wounding 35, according to police. Three bombs also exploded in the mainly Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah shortly before 7 a.m., wounding a member of a government-backed paramilitary group, an army official said. Another bomb exploded 30 minutes later in Karradah in downtown Baghdad, wounding 4 people, a police official said. That was followed a few hours later by two more roadside bombs in Baghdad — one in southwestern Baghdad and the other in eastern Baghdad — that wounded six people, an Iraqi police official said.

WHAT DO THE VEDIC TEACHINGS TELL US?

In the Gurv-astaka, Śrīla Viśvanātha Cakravartī Thākura has sung:

samsāra-dāvānala-līdha-loka-
trānāya kārunya-ghanāghanatvam

A life in this material world is exactly like a blazing forest fire. No one goes to set fire to the forest, yet the fire takes place. Similarly. everyone wants to be happy in the material world, but the miserable conditions of material life simply increase. Sometimes a person caught in the blazing fire of material existence condemns himself, but due to his bodily conception he cannot get out of the entanglement, and thus he suffers more and more.

Srila A.C. BV Swami Prabhupada:
"The Srimad Bhagavatam - Purport in Canto 1 - Chapter 10 - Verse 5"