Up until now, British-led Nato troops in Helmand have lacked the manpower to hold territory it cleared in heavy fighting.
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/ 18 October 2008
Thousands of followers of Moqtada al-Sadr demonstrated on Saturday against a pact that would allow United States forces to stay in Iraq.
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/ 15 October 2008
In the visiting hall of the United States prison camp, Delal Hashem (25) sat opposite her husband Abbas Daoud Salman with the children.
The United States military freed a Reuters television cameraman on Thursday after holding him for three weeks in Iraq without charges.
The United States military said on Monday it had killed 22 fighters who attacked an Iraqi checkpoint in north-eastern Baghdad under cover of an overnight dust storm. The attack was one of the biggest in weeks, and indicated some fighters had defied an order by Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to observe a ceasefire.
Militants bombarded Baghdad’s Green Zone with rockets on Sunday, taking advantage of the cover of a blinding dust storm to launch one of the heaviest strikes in weeks on the fortified compound. The strikes appeared to defy a renewed call for a ceasefire by Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which has seen many of his masked gunmen leave the streets of the Sadr City slum.
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.
Iraq’s prime minister has raised the stakes in his showdown with followers of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, saying in an interview broadcast on Monday they would be barred from elections unless their militia disbanded. The comments followed raids on Sunday by security forces into the cleric’s Baghdad stronghold, the slum of Sadr City.
The United States confirmed on Sunday that US special forces units were operating alongside Iraqi government troops in Basra, where the government is battling militants loyal to Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The Iraqi special forces team killed four suspected militants in a house and two on a roof before calling in an air strike.
United States forces were drawn deeper into Iraq’s four day-old crackdown on Shi’ite militants on Friday, launching air strikes in Basra for the first time and battling militants in Baghdad. The fighting has exposed a rift within the majority Shi’ite community and put pressure on Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.