Anger as Iraq buries dead holidaymakers

An angry and grieving Iraq yesterday buried nine holidaymakers, including a newlywed, killed in the artillery bombardment of a Kurdish hill village.Germany, France and Iran condemned the attack.The coffins of the nine dead, draped in Iraqi national flags and festooned with flowers, were flown on a military aircraft to Baghdad from Arbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdistan region.An honour guard bore the coffins at a ceremony witnessed by Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi on the tarmac of Baghdad’s airport, where his office said he met relatives of the victims who came to claim their loved ones’ bodies for burial.Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein and Kurdish regional president Nechirvan Barzani had led the pallbearers carrying the smallest of the coffins, a child’s, onto the military plane in ArbilWednesday’s shelling in the Zakho district village of Parakh also wounded 23 people, the majority of them domestic tourists seeking respite from the heat of the plains in the mountains of the Kurdish north. Among the dead was Abbas Alaa, 24, an engineer married for barely a week, said a friend who gave his name as Nour.