Monday Morning in Kirkuk

"Please can't you tell me if I passed reading? I am going home today and won't be here to collect my marks next Monday..." Many of the students come to us IMMEDIATELY after taking their last exam requesting to know their final scores (as it we could have marked them in the 2 minute gap between collecting the papers and walking to our offices)- scores we don't give out until a week after the exams. So I told D, a Kirkuki, to go home and I would email him his results so he wouldn't have to come back from Kirkuk - a place I have only passed through on the way to Sulemaniya... The scary thing is pictures below (taken today) are of the road I passed through Kirkuk on... and which Mu takes 2-4 times a week... and which I hope D wasn't on today.
85 dead and 180 injured have been counted so far from this morning's triple bombing in Kirkuk. This truck carried one of those bombs. Some of the people who died were those trapped in a bus that caught on fire.
As I can't bear the photos of people, the below photo appears to be of a cow being carried away from the scene on a make-shift stretcher.

These photos are from Mu's friend Mu, who for some reason was working from my house for part of today - a journalist receiving photos from Kirkuk via the internet and giving live interviews over the telephone. I am almost too scared to watch the news because the death toll climbs hour by hour (I guess it will reach 200) and some of the photos received from Kirkuk were too gruesome to mention or post here. Reading the news doesn't offer much food for optimism. Instead of the news tonight, I will read D's essay on the Arabization of Kirkuk, Article 140 and why he believes it should be implemented without delay.