A bomb blast killed three people and wounded 11 in one of Baghdad’s main squares on Thursday as the interim defence minister said restoring security to the capital was top priority for the new government. The force of the explosion levelled a building on Tahrir Square in the capital’s commercial heart, one of a series of attacks around the country.
The trial of Saddam Hussein over the massacre of Shi’ites in the 1980s degenerated into a chaotic shouting match on Monday after the ejection of one of the deposed Iraqi dictator’s female lawyers. Lebanese lawyer Bushra Khalil had returned to court after a long absence following her expulsion in early April by Judge Rauf Abdel Rahman.
An X-ray of Kamil Abdel Qader’s lungs show a lower third that is entirely scarred — lasting damage from the poisonous gas that rained down on the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. Doctors say he needs to get a fist-size chunk of tissue removed from his damaged lungs if he is going to survive, but he still considers himself the lucky one.
Home to hundreds of aircraft under Saddam Hussein’s ousted regime, the dusty al-Muthana air base outside the Iraqi capital today hosts just three lonely cargo planes. After obliterating Saddam’s formidable air force in the 1991 Gulf war and the invasion of 2003, United States forces say they are now putting the pieces back together in the hope that Iraqis will eventually take over for the coalition.