Assailants killed an Iraqi deputy foreign minister on Saturday in an ambush that occurred as he was travelling to his Baghdad office, the Foreign Ministry said. Gunmen shot Bassam Salih Kubba in Baghdad’s Azimiyah district, a Sunni Muslim neighborhood where support for Saddam Hussein’s regime had been strong.
…But the reaction of groups excluded from the interim government could spell trouble. Mainstream Shia and Sunni Arab politicians this week welcomed a new United Nations resolution unanimously agreed by the UN Security Council on Tuesday, which promises broad powers to the interim government after June 30.
Shi’ite gunmen seized an Iraq police station in the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf and held it for two hours on Thursday in the first outbreak of fighting since an agreement to end weeks of bloody clashes between United States troops and militia forces. Four Iraqis were killed and 13 were injured, hospital and militia officials said.
Saboteurs blew up an oil pipeline in Iraq on Wednesday, forcing a 10% cut in output for the national electricity grid, Iraqi officials said. The attack appeared part of an insurgent campaign against infrastructure to shake confidence in the new government.
The new government in Iraq has convinced nine major political parties to disband their militias in a move to assert state control three weeks before the return of sovereignty, the prime minister said on Monday. The nine do not include the militia of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Four United States soldiers were killed and five wounded on Friday when a blast struck their convoy on the edge of the Shi’ite militia stronghold of Sadr City, the US military said. Witnesses said the convoy was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade before a roadside bomb was detonated.
Iraq’s interim Foreign Minister, Hoshiyar Zebari, flew to New York on Wednesday night, determined to press the United Nations Security Council for ”as much sovereignty as possible” during talks on Thursday over a new draft resolution. The United States-British proposal, revealed on Tuesday, is designed to underpin the country’s transition from occupation to independence.
The United States-led occupation force in Iraq on Tuesday dissolved the governing council that it set up after toppling Saddam Hussein 14 months ago and installed an new interim government as the United Nations Security Council prepared to debate a resolution on the country’s future.
At least four people, including a woman, were killed and more than 20 wounded on Monday when at least one car bomb exploded in a western Baghdad neighbourhood, witnesses and hospital sources said. The blast happened in front of a house belonging to a former senior Ba’ath official from Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Britain on Wednesday denied it is at odds with the United States over the powers of a new Iraqi government as deadly violence dogged the countdown to the coalition’s June 30 deadline for the handover. At least 18 Iraqis and two Russians were killed in separate incidents, at least 13 of them in clashes in the central holy city of Najaf.
Blair jumps the gun on Iraqi veto
An artillery round containing deadly sarin nerve gas exploded after it was discovered by coalition forces in Iraq, causing a ”very small dispersal of agent”, a United States military spokesperson said on Monday. Sarin works by being inhaled or absorbed through the skin and kills by crippling the nervous system.
The United States army kept up a deadly battle against radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr as the US-British allies faced a grilling on Tuesday over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and foreigners came under renewed attack. US forces said they killed 13 members of al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia in an overnight clash outside Kufa near Najaf.
With a few carefully worded phrases, the United States military is apparently stepping back from its strict demands on ending the siege of Fallujah, creating an opening for an Iraqi force to take control of the city from 1 000 or more guerrilla holdouts.
‘A real crisis of leadership in Iraq’
Eight Iraqi rebels were killed and at least four United States marines wounded in fierce fighting in the besieged city of Fallujah on Monday while a powerful blast at a Baghdad chemical plant claimed two lives. Vital oil exports from Iraq’s main southern terminals resumed after a brief halt caused by foiled suicide boat raids at the weekend.
A South African security guard working for the United States-led coalition was shot dead in the Sunni Muslim district of Al-Adhamiyah in Baghdad on Thursday, Iraq’s interim health minister said. A local policeman said US troops rushed to the area, put the body in a plastic bag and took it away.
The United Nations’s adviser on Iraq made a surprising attack on Washington’s handling of its year-long occupation this week, condemning the detention of prisoners without trial or charge and offering a withering analysis of the United States’s governance of the country.
The Arabic television station Al-Jazeera showed footage on Tuesday of what it said are four Italian hostages abducted by insurgents in Iraq, as the top Italian diplomat in Baghdad confirmed four nationals are missing. A statement from the kidnappers called for ”a commitment to withdraw Italian troops from Iraq”, the station said.
Half the Iraqis killed in the United States offensive in the town of Fallujah were women, children and elderly people, a mediator said on Tuesday, but US officials insisted they take all precautions to avoid non-combatants. Meanwhile, a crashed US Apache helicopter was seen burning on the ground outside Fallujah on Tuesday.
Al-Jazeera airs hostage video
US pledges to arrest or kill Shia cleric
Chinese officials are seeking to contact mediators to secure the release of seven Chinese citizens who have become the latest foreigners to be kidnapped in Iraq, a Chinese diplomat said. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said the hostages are from the eastern province of Fujian.
The ceasefire in the flashpoint Iraqi town of Fallujah has been extended until Monday night, with the agreement of both United States forces and insurgents, a mediator said. An AFP correspondent on the ground in Fallujah said the ceasefire seemed to be holding on Monday morning.
Eight South Koreans and three Japanese were kidnapped by insurgents in Iraq, and captors armed with automatic rifles and swords threatened on Thursday to burn the Japanese alive if Tokyo does not withdraw from the United States-led coalition. The group calls itself the ”Mujahedeen Squadrons”.
The United States-led coalition entered the most dangerous phase yet of its occupation of Iraq on Wednesday night as the Sunni and Shia uprisings spread from Kirkuk in the north to Kut in the south.
Many of Baghdad’s Shiite and Sunni Muslims on Wednesday rallied behind embattled firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr whose banned militia is facing a nationwide assault by US-led coalition forces. Al-Sadr meanwhile called for power in Iraq to be handed over to ”honest men” and not to collaborators of the US-led occupation.
United States officials vowed on Tuesday to hunt down and destroy the militia of a radical Shiite Muslim cleric, as coalition troops struggled to stop Iraq sliding into chaos with more than 150 people killed on both sides in three days of clashes.
Uprising in Iraq could derail Bush
At least 22 people were killed and as many as 200 injured on Sunday in a three-hour gun battle between coalition troops from the United States, Spain and El Salvador and thousands of Iraqi protesters loyal to a firebrand Shia cleric.
The United States-led coalition braced for bloodshed in Iraq’s capital as mosques linked to a fireband Shiite cleric called for a general strike and the Americans shut the entrances to their Baghdad headquarters in anticipation of violent demonstrations.
Thousands of people rallied outside the Baghdad headquarters of the United States-led coalition on Friday in a continued protest against a decision to suspend a newspaper owned by a radical Iraqi Shiite Muslim cleric. The peaceful protest was the biggest since the coalition last week temporarily shut the weekly.
United States overseer in Iraq Paul Bremer vowed on Thursday that the grisly killing of four civilian contractors will ”not go unpunished”, amid reactions of horror at images of the burning and dismemberment of the Americans. Bremer said the four, along with five US troops killed in the same area west of Baghdad, ”have not died in vain”.
A powerful explosion destroyed a hotel in central Baghdad on Wenesday night, killing at least 27 people and injuring 40, including two Britons. The blast, three days before the anniversary of the United States-led invasion, left a crater six metres across and three metres deep outside the Mount Lebanon hotel.
Three children and one adult were killed in a series of rocket strikes by insurgents on Baghdad on Tuesday night, a United States army officer said on Wednesday. ”Three rockets were fired. They were from outside the city. One landed in the south, one in the north and one in the city centre,” the officer said.
Iraqi officials on Wednesday multiplied their calls for calm fearing the attacks on Shiite Muslims that killed scores in two cities could radicalise the community. Angry Shiites in Baghdad accused radical Sunnis of being responsible. In Karbala, Shiites blamed Wahhabis, believers in a radical form of Sunni Islam from Saudi Arabia.
170 dead in Iraq on festival day