Followers of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr staged noisy protests on Thursday against a crackdown on Shi’ite fighters in Basra as the southern oil hub was rocked by a third straight day of fighting. Demonstrations were held in Sadr City and Kadhimiyah, two Baghdad bastions of Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia.
A wave of attacks across Iraq on Sunday killed 51 people, while insurgents fired a barrage of mortars at Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, sending United States embassy staff scurrying into bunkers. The deadliest attack was in the city of Mosul where a suicide bomber crashed an explosives-laden truck into an Iraqi army base.
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/ 30 November 2007
Authorities arrested more people on Friday after car bombs were found near the offices of Iraqi politician Adnan al-Dulaimi. Dulaimi said United States and Iraqi troops held 43 people in raids on his Baghdad office and home after discovering two primed car bombs nearby.
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/ 1 November 2007
At least 887 Iraqis were killed in Iraq in October, ministry data showed on Thursday, slightly higher than September, which saw a total of 840 people killed across the nation. Data from Iraq’s interior, defence and health ministries showed that 758 civilians, 116 policemen and 13 soldiers were killed in attacks across Iraq in October.
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/ 10 September 2007
Iraq’s embattled Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki gave an upbeat assessment of the situation in his country on Monday, saying civil war had been prevented and boasting that violence had dropped 75% in the restive provinces of Baghdad and Anbar.
Gunmen dressed in Iraqi military uniforms stormed a village in the restive Iraqi province of Diyala, north-east of Baghdad, overnight and murdered 29 people, security officials said on Tuesday. And insurgents continued to carry out attacks in the capital, setting off two car bombs in Baghdad, including one near the Iranian embassy.
The day his mother and brother died is permanently engraved into the mind of eight-year-old Iraqi boy Ziad Irhaima — it is also cauterised on one of his arms into a small gnarled stump. Irhaima’s lost family members are only two of the countless and largely anonymous victims of the more than four years of bloodshed in Iraq.
Radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr pulled his six ministers out of Iraq’s beleaguered coalition government on Monday as he pushed his demand for a rapid withdrawal of United States troops from the country. The Shi’ite hard-liner was angered last week when street protests failed to persuade Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to set a timeline for US forces to go home.
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/ 19 February 2007
Bombs detonated across central Iraq on Monday, adding 40 more bloodied corpses to the grim toll of Iraqi dead as rebel groups mount a savage challenge to the latest United States and Iraqi security plan. The attacks will in the main be blamed on Sunni insurgents and appear to have been timed to embarrass US and Iraqi commanders.
Iraq’s ousted president Saddam Hussein was admitted to hospital on Sunday suffering from the effects of his hunger-strike, chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Musawi told Agence France-Presse. The detained leader, who stopped eating 16 days ago, is too ill to attend the next session of his trial, scheduled for Monday, Musawi said.