Iraq’s Constitution, a key plank of the United States’s exit strategy, was in turmoil on Wednesday as Sunni members of the drafting committee walked out, Kurdish leaders said they could live without a deal, and women’s groups baulked at a proposal to give a strong role to Islamic law.
Three Sunnis working on the draft of Iraq’s new Constitution were gunned down in Baghdad on Tuesday, rattling hopes expressed earlier in the day that the new charter might be completed ahead of schedule. At least 31 people were killed on Tuesday in Iraq violence, police and military officials said.
Iraq’s fledgling government stood accused of leaving its citizens defenceless on Sunday after a devastating three days of suicide attacks left at least 150 people dead and more than 260 wounded.
At least six suicide bombers blew themselves up in Baghdad and northern Iraq on Friday, killing 10 people and wounding about 60 in attacks targeting Iraqi and United States forces, security officials said.
At least 32 children were killed and up to 31 wounded on Wednesday when a car packed with explosives targeted a convoy of United States soldiers on a community relations mission in a Shia area of east Baghdad. The explosion left one US soldier dead and three injured as nearby buildings were enveloped by a fireball.
The Iraqi judge in charge of questioning Saddam Hussein and his former regime henchmen said on Wednesday that more than 80% of the investigation into their cases is complete. ”Deciding the date of the trials is not the speciality of the investigative judges,” said Raed Juhi, a senior judge on the Iraqi special tribunal.
Iraq’s leading Sunni Muslim groups reacted angrily on Tuesday to reports that 10 Sunni Arab men suffocated to death in the back of a police lorry in Baghdad’s sweltering summer heat. The men are alleged to have died after being arrested by Iraqi anti-terrorist special forces on Sunday as they visited relatives in hospital.
Twenty-four Iraqi children were killed on Wednesday morning by a suicide car bomber in Baghdad, as sectarian tensions were stoked when 11 Sunni Arabs were found shot dead after allegedly being arrested by police commandos. Another 18 children were wounded in the blast, which targeted a United States military convoy.
Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari on Tuesday told his violence-weary nation to brace for even larger attacks as insurgents exact revenge on the government for its ”success” in rebuilding the country. At least seven Iraqis were killed in a new spate of attacks that followed a bloody sequence of days for the Iraqi security forces.
Sixteen people were killed and 39 wounded when a suicide bomber wearing a belt of explosives blew himself up early on Sunday outside an army recruitment centre in Baghdad, hospital and security sources said. Also on Sunday, a suicide car bomb exploded in Kirkuk, killing at least two civilians and wounding 16 more, police said.
They came for Nabras Hamid just after sunset, one car blocking the entrance to Dabbash street, the other two stopping outside his shop. Witnesses did not hear the gunmen say anything before opening fire. There was no need. Hamid’s crime was self-evident: he was a barber.
Kidnappers of Egypt’s top diplomat in Iraq have threatened to kill him because Egypt has allied with ”Jews and Christians,” according to a statement posted on Wednesday on an al-Qaeda-linked website. Meanwhile, a senior aide to radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr visited Bahrain’s diplomatic mission on Wednesday.
Coca-Cola has returned to Iraq after an absence of nearly four decades, triggering a cola war in a lucrative but potentially hostile market. Coke ended its 37-year exile last week by setting up a joint-venture bottling company to compete with Pepsi for 26-million consumers.
Suicide bombers struck in Baghdad and a Shi’ite city south of the capital in attacks that killed 26 people and injured nearly 50, Iraqi officials said. One of the attackers targeted bystanders and police who had rushed to the scene of an earlier blast.
The United States military said it plans to expand its prisons across Iraq to hold as many as 16 000 detainees, as the relentless insurgency shows no sign of let-up one year after the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqi authorities.
Saddam Hussein’s family will publish next week a novel written by the ousted Iraqi leader before the US-led war on Iraq, his daughter said on Friday. Ekhroj minha ya mal’un, whose title could be translated into ”Get out, damned one” is a metaphor for a Zionist-Christian plot against Arabs and Muslims.
A string of car bombings in quick succession killed at least 17 people in a Shi’ite district of Baghdad, as two top United States officials insisted the insurgency was under pressure. Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari on Thursday opened a high-profile visit to Washington aimed at soothing US worries about the war.
A top-level European Union delegation arrived in Baghdad on Thursday, expressing hope for the EU’s new partnership with Iraq now that divisions over the United States-led invasion of more than two years ago are healed. ”In Europe, the war divided us, but now we are unified to help Iraq,” said Luxembourg’s minister of foreign affairs.
Former dictator Saddam Hussein will stand trial for a range of charges — from gassing thousands of Kurds to executing political and religious leaders, according to a list of the cases against him obtained from the special tribunal on Monday. Meanwhile, violence by insurgents opposed to Iraq’s new government continues.
Insurgents killed 38 people in a series of rapid-fire attacks, including three suicide car bombings within an hour and a drive-by shooting at a busy Baghdad market that ratcheted up the bloody campaign to undermine Iraq’s government.
Iraqi and American forces said on Wednesday they have arrested two top aides to al-Qaeda’s frontman in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a day after the country’s most wanted man was reported wounded. ”One of the most wanted people” in northern Iraq, Mullah Kamel al-Assawadi, was arrested after he tried to bribe his way past a checkpoint.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi and United States soldiers on Monday swept through Baghdad’s western suburbs, arresting almost 300 suspected insurgents, in the largest such military operation to date. The US military said the raid was aimed at quelling a recent upsurge in car-bomb attacks in the violence-plagued capital.
Several Iraqi Sunni Muslim clerics renewed their call during Friday sermons in Baghdad for a three-day prayer strike in mosques, an unprecedented movement to protest against anti-Sunni assassinations. ”It is a peaceful protest against heinous crimes,” Sheikh Ahmed Abdel Ghafur al-Samarrai said in his Friday sermon.
A series of tit-for-tat killings has raised sectarian tension to boiling point in Iraq, where Sunni religious leaders have openly accused Shi’ite militiamen of kidnapping and murdering Sunni Arabs, including clerics. Meanwhile, top United States generals have suggested Washington’s troop commitment to Iraq could last years.
Mortar barrages, roadside bombings and drive-by shootings killed 10 Iraqis, officials said on Monday, and Iraq’s new government vowed to track down the killers of more than 40 people found slain in the past 48 hours. Batches of bodies, many blindfolded and bound, were found in various locations over the weekend.
At least 10 people were killed and more than 20 injured in a bomb attack on a market in a Shia district of Baghdad on Thursday. The blast followed the deaths of 71 people in a series of suicide bombings on Wednesday. Of the 135 car bombings last month, more than half were suicide missions.
At least 73 Iraqis were killed and more than 120 wounded on Wednesday in a string of bomb attacks in northern Iraq and Baghdad, security officials said. The bloodshed came as a 1Â 000-strong United States force backed by aircraft battled insurgents in the west of the country.
Bombings at two locations in northern Iraq killed at least 30 people on Wednesday at an army recruiting centre in Hawijah and 28 near a police station in Tikrit, officials said. A remote-controlled car bomb was used in Tikrit, while the attack in Hawijah was believed to be the work of a suicide bomber with an explosives belt.
United States forces hunting down followers of Iraq’s most wanted terrorist pushed into a lawless region north of the Euphrates River near the Syrian border on Tuesday after meeting unexpected resistance from insurgents hidden in remote desert outposts along the waterway’s southern shores.
Nine Iraqis were killed and 17 wounded in attacks around the country on Monday, police and medics said, as insurgents continued to strike at Iraq’s fledgling security forces. Four people were killed and nine wounded when a suicide bomber rammed his car into two police vehicles at a roadside checkpoint in south-west Baghdad.
Insurgents killed at least 20 people in three separate attacks targeting Iraqi security forces in Baghdad on Thursday, including one by a man who set off hidden explosives while waiting in line outside an army recruitment centre, police said.
At least 25 people were killed in a series of attacks on Thursday in Baghdad, including nine policemen who were shot and killed in their squad cars and 15 who died in a bomb explosion at an army recruitment centre, an interior ministry official said. In addition, a guard was killed in a car bomb attack on the home of a deputy defence minister in the capital.