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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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/ 22 January 2007
Two car bombs ripped through a busy market in Baghdad on Monday, killing 88 people in fresh violence of the kind that United States and Iraqi forces plan to target in a new offensive in the lawless capital. Hours later, at least 14 people were killed and 40 wounded when a bomb exploded in a town near Baquba, north-east of Baghdad, police sources said.
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/ 18 December 2006
British Prime Minister Tony Blair pledged on Sunday to support Iraq’s government as it battles instability underscored when gunmen carried out a mass kidnapping at a Red Crescent office in the capital. Just before Blair landed in Baghdad for an unannounced visit, police said 10 to 20 people were seized from the Red Crescent’s Baghdad office but the aid agency said more were snatched.
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/ 24 November 2006
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.
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/ 23 November 2006
Six car bombs killed at least 133 people in a Shi’ite stronghold in Baghdad on Thursday, one of the bloodiest attacks since the United States invasion and likely to inflame sectarian passions in a nation sliding towards civil war. A further 201 people were wounded, police said.
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/ 23 November 2006
Guerrilla fighters attacked an Iraqi ministry in central Baghdad on Thursday with mortars and machine guns in one of the most dramatic shows of force by militant groups in the capital since the United States invasion in 2003. A deputy minister in the Shi’ite-run Health Ministry and a police source said about 30 unidentified gunmen were involved.
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/ 21 November 2006
Iraq and neighbouring Syria agreed to restore full diplomatic relations on Tuesday in an accord in which Syria accepted that United States troops should stay while the Iraqi government needed them. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem was making the first visit by a Syrian minister to Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003.
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/ 10 October 2006
Iraqi police found 60 bodies dumped across Baghdad in the 24 hours until Tuesday morning, all apparent victims of sectarian death squads, an Interior Ministry official said. The United States military also said Iraqi and US forces had killed 11 militants, most dressed as Iraqi police officers, in fresh clashes in the southern Shi’ite city of Diwaniya.
The United States military denied on Thursday reports it had killed the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, and Iraqi officials said they were awaiting the results of DNA tests on several suspects killed in a raid. US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson said US forces had conducted a raid ”recently” on an al-Qaeda cell in which suspected insurgents were killed.
More than 40 people were killed in bomb attacks in Iraq on Wednesday morning, including 24 at a busy market in Baghdad where insurgents seem intent on defying a major United States-backed security clampdown now in its fourth week. A further 35 people were wounded in the attack on the Shorja wholesale market in central Baghdad, police said.