IRAQ: Roadside bomb kills 5 at a football pitch in Falluja

A roadside bomb targeting an Iraqi Army convoy killed five and wounded fifteen, including three children, at a municipal football pitch in Falluja, 60km (37 miles) west of Baghdad on Thursday (September 14), witnesses and medics said. There were no military casualties in the blast, just civilians who were either playing football or spectating at the time, local residents said. "When it exploded one of the kids here, his guts spilled out, another had his back ripped off, another - his hand was almost ripped off his arm. He was lying down here. A guy came to pick up the boys in a minibus. There were ten of them. They were just playing football," said Ali Majid, a teenager at the scene. Falluja, a former rebel stronghold, is in the restive Anbar province that is at the centre of the Sunni insurgency against U.S. forces. The U.S. commander in Anbar denied suggestions his force had lost control to al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgents but said stabilising the western desert region would be a job for Iraqi politicians and their U.S.-trained troops and police. U.S. and Iraqi leaders say that the biggest threat to Iraq no longer comes from the three-year-old revolt among ousted president Saddam Hussein's fellow Sunni Muslims but from the bloodshed between Sunnis and the Shi'ite majority now in power.

ITN Source | September 16, 2006

Tags:. .thursday. .scene. .hand. .leaders. .job