Yesterday, two U.S. B-1 bombers and four F-16 fighters dropped an estimated 40,000 pounds of high explosives in the course of an attack lasting just 10 minutes on Sunni farmlands near the centre of Baghdad, to the south of the capital.

This would appear to represent a marked escalation in the campaign of terror, violence and devastation unleased by the U.S. insurgency, reflecting an obvious desperation as they face humiliating withdrawal. The pretext for the attack was that the Iraqi resistance were operating from bases in the bombed area.

Reporting the incident, CBS News described the farming village of Zambaraniyah on the outskirts of Arab Jabour, approximately nine miles southeast of Baghdad, as to how most of the land is torched or left fallow along small roads that were once laced with booby traps and bombs with fields that are strewn with trash and the blackened hulks of cars and many buildings and most homes pockmarked by gunfire.

The US claim that yesterday's attack was one of the largest airstrikes since the onset of the "war" in March 2003. Moahmoud Chiad, a local resident said immediately prior to the attack, local residents were ordered by loudspeaker to stay in their homes.
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A new study published by the New England Journal of Medicine, undertaken by the World Health Organization and Iraq's own Ministry of Health, based on an extensive survey of Iraqi households suggests that to date at least 151,000 people have died of war-related violence in Iraq since the unlawful U.S. invasion began. However, an earlier study by researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated the number of deaths at more than 600,000.

This despicable and vengeful attack has presumably been intended to damage local agriculture in order to make Iraq dependent on imported food.