Today's Progess Report

Ali al-Saadi/Agence France Presse

We heard a lot of talk from some senators (including Traitor Joe Lieberman) about how well the 'surge' was going.

A little reality check:

BAGHDAD, July 17 — Assassinations and car bombs killed at least 39 people in Iraq on Tuesday and details emerged of a massacre of Shiite civilians in Diyala Province on Monday in which at least 29 people were killed.

One car bomb on Tuesday exploded in the Zayouna neighborhood of Baghdad, the capital, killing 20 people, four of them Iraqi Army soldiers, and wounding 20, according to a police official at the Interior Ministry.

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Another car bomb, this one near the Iranian Embassy, killed four people, according to an Interior Ministry official. The police also reported finding 24 bodies in the city on Tuesday.

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A village of 30 to 35 houses, Dulayiya, referred to in earlier military reports as Adwala, is in an isolated area in the countryside north of Baquba, the provincial capital. It is populated by members of the Bawi tribe, a large tribe in Diyala Province.

Gunmen wearing Iraqi Army uniforms and driving civilian pickup trucks surrounded several houses on one side of the village, the police said. It was not clear if they shot at the houses or dragged people out of them and then executed them, but police officers who reached the area on Tuesday said mostly young men were killed and that the gunmen later mutilated 10 of the bodies.

~snip~

The violence on Tuesday included an attack on a judge in Salahuddin Province north of Baghdad. Gunmen wearing uniforms of the security forces stopped Judge Hamdi Habeeb al-Jubori at a fake checkpoint as he was heading home and shot him to death, according to Col. Hameed Majeed of the Tikrit police. The director of a local hospital was also killed Tuesday in a shooting that wounded three people driving with him in his car, provincial officials said.

In Wasit Province south and east of Baghdad, the Iraqi police found five bodies floating in the Tigris River. They were all civilians, bore marks of torture and had been shot multiple times, said a police official in Kut, the provincial capital. A truck driver was also killed in the area. Afterward, the gunmen burned the truck, which was loaded with food and was headed to Baghdad.

Via the NYTimes Attackers Kill 39 in Iraq.

Sounds pretty hellish to me.