The Big Story Is That Things Have Gotten Better

Updated at 8:15 p.m. EDT, April 10, 2008

Fighting in Sadr City has subsided dramatically, but violence still took the lives of 68 Iraqis across Iraq. Almost half of them were found in a mass grave. […]

A mass grave containing 33 bodies was found in Mahmudiyah. The bodies were found together in a house and appear to have been dead for over a year.[…]

In Baghdad, a U.S. airstrike left five dead and four injured in Sadr City in one attack; two boys were among the dead. Another person was killed and four more were wounded in a second bombing. At least two other people were wounded during these or other air strikes. U.S. forces killed 13 suspects across Baghdad yesterday. No casualties were reported after an IED blasted a U.S. patrol. Also, the Iraqi army blockade of Sadr City will end on Saturday.

In other incidents taking place in the capital, one person was killed and four were wounded during a bombing in a central neighborhood. A roadside bomb near al-Shabb Stadium wounded six people. Two police officers were injured during a bombing near Sheik Abdulqadir al-Gailani Shrine. Three people were wounded when shells blasted their home in Bayaa. Also, two dumped bodies were found.

Antiwar.com tallies the dead in Iraq daily so you don't have to. U.S. forces, it says, killed 13 suspects across Baghdad yesterday, many of them by aerial bombardment. Even all these years after the first Gulf War, the U.S. is firing on Baghdad from the air, and hitting the predictable child or two.

Apparently the dead found in a mass grave in Mahmudiyah have been added to today's 35 freshly killed from all over Iraq to arrive at the figure of 68 dead for Thursday, although it's reported that the bodies of the 33 were in a house in Mahmudiyah for over a year, not alive all that time, but until today not notably dead. Perhaps this is just a preliminary assignment, until the proper date of death can be unearthed by whoever might be spared to find it.

The sound of the opening of the odd mass grave on a day much like any other desperate day in Iraq (just scroll down through antiwar.com's meticulous daily coverage of the carnage for proof enough) is that disquieting noise in the background you may hear behind the dulcet tones of John Burns and Dexter Filkins recorded last night on the Charlie Rose Show, by way of DavidKurtz at Talking Points Memo.