Iraq’s security forces were on high alert on Monday in Baghdad as US troops finalised their withdrawal from the conflict-hit nation’s urban areas.
Back-to-back suicide bombings killed 60 people on Friday outside the most important Shi’ite shrine in Baghdad.
Thousands of supporters of an anti-US Shi’ite cleric rallied on Thursday at a main downtown square in Baghdad to protest the US military presence.
A spate of car bombings in Baghdad killed at least 34 people and wounded nearly 140 on Monday, security officials said, updating an earlier toll.
Several thousand followers of radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for an end to US occupation of Iraq after prayers on Friday.
Muntadher al-Zeidi stands trial today inside Baghdad’s Green Zone at the central criminal court, an area normally reserved for terrorist cases.
Two major bombings in two days in Iraq have left scores of people dead and sparked new security concerns as United States forces prepare to pull out.
Iraqi and United States officials also confirm that Britain’s remaining 4 000 troops in the country would leave by the end of July.
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/ 17 February 2009
Germany plans to open on Tuesday an information office for German businesses operating in Iraq, with centres in Baghdad and Erbil.
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/ 17 February 2009
Women candidates are expected to fill many of the seats on Iraq’s provincial governing councils. But winning public acceptance is another matter.
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/ 1 February 2009
Iraqis held their most peaceful election since the fall of Saddam Hussein on Saturday, voting for provincial councils without a single major attack.
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/ 16 January 2009
In a project started late last year Iraqi artists are taking objects that have brought devastation to Iraq and using them to create instead.
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/ 2 December 2008
Saddam Hussein’s notorious hatchet-man, Hassan al-Majid, was on Tuesday sentenced to death for war crimes committed during the 1991 Shi’ite uprising.
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/ 15 November 2008
Trend towards increased stability in Iraq is
rocked by women attackers in Diyala province. Martin Chulov in Baghdad reports.
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/ 10 November 2008
At least 28 people were killed, including women and children, and dozens wounded in a double bombing in a Baghdad market on Monday.
In Iraq’s national museum a frieze shows Assyrian King Sargon II, storming a rampart as soldiers pile decapitated heads before him.
Iraqi policeman Ali Abdul Hussein should have been celebrating the end of Ramadan. Instead, he wept outside a Baghdad mosque for dead friends.
A suicide bomber in a car killed 25 people on Thursday and a roadside bomb killed five members of a family in Diyala, Iraq, police and witnesses said.
For Iraqis, it’s a vision of what Baghdad could be — a colourful lakeside resort where children can swim and strollers take in the sunset.
An Iraqi clan overwhelmed by shock and grief buried its dead on Monday after a suicide bomber killed 25 people at a celebratory banquet in Baghdad.
At a communal water station in a Baghdad slum, a young boy’s skinny arms fly up and down as he uses a bicycle pump to coax water from the dry ground.
Violence and political instability have made weddings in Baghdad virtually impossible. Caitlin Fitzsimmons reports.
Three suicide bombers, believed to be women, killed 25 Shi’ite pilgrims on Monday as they headed to a holy shrine in Baghdad.
The US military faced Iraqi anger on Sunday over a raid near Kerbala in which a distant relative of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was killed.
Nineteen United States soldiers were killed in Iraq in May, the lowest monthly death toll since the US-led invasion of 2003, the US military said on Sunday. The month that saw the highest US losses was November 2004, when 137 American troops were killed.
Iraqi security forces have detained a man suspected of being the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq after a captured associate led them to him sleeping in a house in the northern city of Mosul, Iraqi officials said on Friday. More than eight hours after the Iraqi announcement, the United States military said it still had no confirmation that Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian, had been seized.
A man seized by Iraqi forces is not the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, a senior United States military official said on Friday, following an announcement by several Iraqi officials that Abu Ayyub al-Masri had been captured. Security sources had already begun to cast doubt on the earlier announcement that Masri, an Egyptian also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, had been captured.
The United States military fired rockets at a target near a hospital in eastern Baghdad on Saturday, wounding 20 people. No patients were wounded at the hospital in the Sadr City stronghold of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, but 20 people at the scene of the blasts were wounded.
Two suicide bombers killed 30 people and wounded 65 others when they detonated explosive vests in a busy market in a town north-east of Baghdad on Thursday, Iraqi police said. Police said the second bomber struck as crowds rushed to evacuate the wounded from the first attack.
More than 900 people have been killed in clashes between militiamen and security forces in Baghdad’s Sadr City, which broke out last month, a senior Iraqi official told reporters on Wednesday. ”There were 925 martyrs in Sadr City and 2 605 others have been wounded”, said Tehseen Sheikhly, a spokesperson for the government’s Baghdad security plan.
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.