Gunmen in police uniforms kidnapped five Britons from a government building in Baghdad on Tuesday and the deaths of 10 United States soldiers were announced, making May the deadliest month this year for the US military. The gunmen seized the Britons from a Finance Ministry building in eastern Baghdad.
Multiple car bombs exploded at about the same time and killed at least 40 people in a mainly Shi’ite town north of Baghdad on Thursday, officials said. A hospital source said in addition to the 40 dead, at least 80 more people were wounded in the blasts. One witness reported seeing at least eight people killed in one of the blasts.
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/ 5 February 2007
Like many of his colleagues, Abu Zaid was issued an Austrian-made Glock pistol when he joined the new United States-trained and equipped Iraqi police force. But after narrowly escaping death twice, including being shot at near a polling station in Baghdad during national elections in December 2005, he decided to quit, he said.
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/ 2 February 2007
Two suicide bombers killed 61 people and wounded 150 when they blew themselves up at a crowded market in Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslim town of Hilla on Thursday, police said. The blasts, along with bomb and mortar attacks in Baghdad that killed 11 people, underscored the challenges for the government of Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
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/ 2 February 2007
Six months after the United States invasion of Iraq, Esam Pasha, a 30-year-old Iraqi artist and writer, proudly painted a mural called Resilience over a giant portrait of Saddam Hussein on the wall of a government building. Now he lives in the US. Pasha is among hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been driven abroad since the war whose skills Iraq can ill afford to lose.
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/ 24 January 2007
United States helicopters attacked gunmen holed up inside high-rise buildings in Baghdad on Wednesday in what the US military said was an operation to regain control of a major street cutting through the heart of the city. Thirty suspected insurgents were killed and 35 more detained during day-long gun battles in the area, Defence Ministry spokesperson Mohammed al-Askari said.
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/ 3 December 2006
Lawyers for Saddam Hussein and two former aides sentenced to death lodged appeals on Sunday, the Iraqi prosecutor said, following a trial slammed by some rights experts as unfair and fundamentally flawed. The defence had been given until Tuesday to submit their appeals.
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/ 10 October 2006
The chief judge ejected Saddam Hussein and a co-defendant punched one of the guards and denounced prosecutors as pimps and traitors during the toppled Iraq leader’s genocide trial on Tuesday. The government criticised the United States-backed court after the chaotic scenes. Last month it sacked the previous presiding judge because it believed he was too soft with Saddam.
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/ 29 September 2006
A brother-in-law of the judge trying Saddam Hussein for genocide was shot dead by gunmen while driving in western Baghdad, police said on Friday. A police source told Reuters that the 10-year-old nephew of chief judge Mohammed al-Ureybi and a third person in the car were wounded in the attack on Thursday evening.
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/ 20 September 2006
The new chief judge in Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial ejected the ousted Iraqi leader from the courtroom for refusing to sit down moments after hearings began on Wednesday. Defence lawyers also stormed out in protest against the sacking of Mohammed al-Ureybi’s predecessor.