April 15, 2007
MarkBernstein.org
 

Sarifiya Bridge

This morning, a truck bomber destroyed the Sarafiya Bridge in Baghdad.

Any way you look at it, this is very bad news. Bridges are very expensive to (re)build. It takes months or years. In the meantime, people will have a harder time getting around Baghdad. Tanks and armored personnel carriers will have fewer routes, which means they'll be easier to ambush. It will be harder to get to Mustansiriya University, which wikipedia says was founded in 1233 and bombed in January 2007 and bombed again in February, and which Sunni groups want to close in order to purge Shiite militias that patrol the campus.

While I was composing this, someone exploded a bomb in the cafeteria of the Iraqi parliament. This sure is going well....