Barack Obama flew into Baghdad on Monday, officials said, thrusting US strategy in Iraq and troop levels to the centre-stage of the November election.
The US military faced Iraqi anger on Sunday over a raid near Kerbala in which a distant relative of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was killed.
At least 15 people were killed and 35 wounded when a female suicide bomber blew herself up among police officers north of Baghdad on Sunday.
Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Saturday threatened an ”open war” against the Iraqi government unless it halted a crackdown by Iraqi and United States security forces on his followers. The spectre of a full-scale uprising by Sadr sharply raises the stakes in his confrontation with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
Two car bombs killed more than 50 people in Sunni Arab areas of Iraq on Tuesday, a sudden spasm of violence in places that had been comparatively quiet while battles raged in the Shi’ite south. In one of the deadliest strikes in months, one car bomb killed 40 people and wounded 70 others in Baquba.
Gunmen kidnapped 42 university students near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Sunday, police said, in one of the biggest mass abductions in the country in many months. ”Gunmen stopped two buses in a village south of Mosul,” said Khalid Abdul-Sattar, police spokesperson for Nineveh province. The group was freed hours after being kidnapped.
A series of car bombs and mortar attacks killed 50 people in Iraq, police and local officials said on Saturday, while the United States military announced six soldiers had been killed in the past two days. The fresh violence follows a relatively quiet few days in Iraq, where tens of thousands of US and Iraqi troops are on the offensive against insurgents
A car bomb killed 25 people and wounded 40 on Thursday at an intersection in Baghdad where minibuses pick up and drop off passengers, Iraqi police said. In the southern city of Basra, a roadside bomb killed three British soldiers and seriously wounded another in the early hours of Thursday, the British military said.
A suicide truck bomber killed 78 people when he rammed his vehicle into a Shi’ite mosque in Baghdad on Tuesday, just hours after the United States military deployed 10 000 soldiers in a major offensive. The offensive around the city of Baquba in Diyala province is partly aimed at taking down al-Qaeda car-bomb networks.
The United States military said it had launched a huge offensive against al Qaeda north of Baghdad on Tuesday involving 10 000 soldiers, one of the single biggest operations since the end of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The military said that 22 militants had been killed in the early hours of the offensive, which is taking place around the city of Baquba.