Alastair Macdonald
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/ 30 December 2006

Saddam Hussein hanged at dawn

Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn on Saturday, a dramatic end for a leader who ruled Iraq by fear for three decades before a United States invasion toppled him and was then convicted of crimes against humanity. As day broke on one of the holiest days of the Muslim year, officially-backed television channels flashed the news shortly after 6am.

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/ 4 December 2006

Dozens of corpses found in Baghdad

Police found about 50 bodies with gunshot wounds in Baghdad over the past day, an Interior Ministry source said on Monday, a day after United Nations chief Kofi Annan declared Iraq’s plight as worse than civil war. Sectarian death squads have made the Iraqi capital a killing field and many of the bodies had been bound and tortured.

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/ 2 December 2006

Bombs devastate Baghdad market

Car bombs tore through a fruit and vegetable market in a Shi’ite area of central Baghdad on Saturday, killing 43 people in another devastating attack that is fuelling an increasingly vicious cycle of sectarian violence. The bombing came two days after United States President George Bush met Iraq’s prime minister to discuss ways to avert all-out civil war and 10 days after the bloodiest attack since the US invasion killed more than 200 people in the capital.

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/ 24 November 2006

Bloodshed in Baghdad

Gunmen attacked a Sunni Arab neighbourhood of Baghdad and burned mosques on Friday in apparent retaliation for the bloodiest bombing in more than three years of war that killed 202 in a Shi’ite area. Two suicide bombs ripped through a Shi’ite market in northern Iraq killing 22 people earlier on Friday and mortars crashed on rival Baghdad neighbourhoods.