Informed Speculation

The bad, another brutal bombing:

Two suicide bombers killed at least 90 Shiites making a pilgrimage south of Baghdad ahead of a weekend holiday, police said Tuesday.

The pilgrims came under attack as they streamed south, mostly on foot, toward a shrine in Karbala. Two bombers exploded themselves in a crowd of pilgrims in Hillah, about 60 miles south of the capital.

The coordinated attack happened on a main street in Hillah, said Capt. Muthana Khalid. Police said 237 pilgrims were wounded in total, according to Reuters.

The attacks are likely to increase sectarian tensions between majority Shiites and Sunni Arabs that have threatened to plunge the country into all-out civil war.

Separately, U.S. officials said nine American soldiers died in explosions north of Baghdad on Monday the deadliest single day for U.S. troops in Iraq in nearly a month.

But the overall security picture IS improving, at least in Baghdad:

Violence has fallen in Baghdad, where a joint U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown was in its third week. But U.S. military officials say insurgents have fled the capital for outlying areas, like those where the soldiers were killed Monday.

But the best news is that Iraq’s security ministry is making a concerted effort to root out militia infiltration:

Iraq’s Interior Ministry has fired or reassigned more than 10,000 employees, including high-ranking police, who were found to have tortured prisoners, accepted bribes or had ties to militias, a ministry spokesman has disclosed.

A soon-to-be-released internal inquiry also details 41 incidents of human rights abuse at the ministry. In one case, four members of the national police hanged prisoners from a ceiling and beat them with sticks in a ministry-run prison known as Site 4, according to the report by the ministry’s inspector general.

The United States has pressured Iraq’s Shiite-led government to clean up its security forces as they undertake a broad plan to reduce sectarian violence. Sunni politicians have accused Iraq’s police of collaborating with Shiite death squads.

More than half of those fired or reassigned since June were found to have militia ties, Jassim Hanoon, the Interior Ministry’s deputy spokesman, said in a weekend interview. The investigation is ongoing.

It’s slow progress, perhaps, but it is progress…