The children and an American soldier died Wednesday in a Baghdad neighborhood when a suicide car bomb terrorist targeted a U.S. patrol surrounded at that moment by children, who were being given food, notebooks and candies.
Some reports put the death toll at 27, including 18 children.
“The logic of hatred, therefore, has spread mourning and grief: a grief which is even more acute and heart-rending when realizing that, once again, it is innocent children who are tragically hit by the aberrant fury of violence,” the Vatican’s semiofficial newspaper said in its edition today.
“It is a barbarism,” Latin-rite Archbishop Jean Benjamin Sleiman of Baghdad told the SIR news service.
“It no longer stops before anything or anyone,” he said. “Those children were there to receive something that they don’t have in daily life: food and candies. Children and love are precious for all religious faiths.”
