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.
Iraqi fishmongers complained on Monday that rumours of river carp eating human flesh had caused sales to plummet, even though senior clerics denied reports they had banned the fish from the table. Over the past four years, the bodies of hundreds of victims of the city’s death squads and militias have been dumped in the Tigris.
At least 85 people were killed on Monday by a suicide truck bomb in the volatile Iraqi city of Kirkuk, some of them trapped on a bus where they burned to death, according to a witness. Police also said 180 people were wounded and they warned the death toll could rise from the blast that heightened tension in the northern city.
The United States military expects al-Qaeda in Iraq to strike back with ”spectacular attacks” after a major offensive in and around Baghdad disrupted the network’s activities, a military spokesperson said on Wednesday. Brigadier General Kevin Bergner said 26 high-level al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq had been killed or captured in May and June.
The death toll from Saturday’s truck bomb attack in a market in the northern Iraqi town of Tuz Khurmato may be as high as 150, local officials said on Sunday. Local police and the mayor, Mohammed Rasheed, said the confirmed death toll was 130, with 250 wounded. But police said 20 people were still missing and presumed dead.
A series of car bombs and mortar attacks killed 50 people in Iraq, police and local officials said on Saturday, while the United States military announced six soldiers had been killed in the past two days. The fresh violence follows a relatively quiet few days in Iraq, where tens of thousands of US and Iraqi troops are on the offensive against insurgents
United States troops killed an estimated 26 militants during fierce fighting in Baghdad’s Sadr City early on Saturday in one of the bloodiest clashes in the Shi’ite slum since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The US military said in a statement that American forces staged two separate raids into Sadr City.
A car bomb killed 25 people and wounded 40 on Thursday at an intersection in Baghdad where minibuses pick up and drop off passengers, Iraqi police said. In the southern city of Basra, a roadside bomb killed three British soldiers and seriously wounded another in the early hours of Thursday, the British military said.
A suicide bomber killed 18 people and wounded 40 others when he rammed a fuel tanker into protective walls outside a police headquarters in Iraq’s northern oil city of Baiji on Monday, police said. In a separate attack, eight people died and 31 were wounded when a suicide car bomber struck outside the governor’s office in the Shi’ite city of Hilla.
An Iraqi court on Sunday sentenced to death Saddam Hussein’s cousin, widely known as ”Chemical Ali”, for masterminding a genocidal campaign against Iraq’s ethnic Kurds in the 1980s. A tired-looking Ali Hassan al-Majeed, wearing traditional Arab robes, trembled as the judge read the verdict, one witness said.
A barrage of mortar bombs hit Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone on Thursday and several plumes of smoke could be seen rising near buildings housing the Iraqi parliament and government offices. The Green Zone, on the west side of the Tigris, is Baghdad’s most secure area but has been a frequent target for rockets and mortar bombs fired by militants.
The images are shocking, even by Iraqi standards: two dozen skeletal children, some tied to beds, others writhing in their own waste and some appearing, at first glance, to be dead. Such was the nightmare that greeted United States and Iraqi forces last week when they stumbled upon the al-Hanan orphanage in Baghdad.
United States and Iraqi forces killed at least 30 al-Qaeda militants and found numerous weapons during the first day of an offensive against the Sunni Islamist group north of Baghdad, the US military said on Wednesday. The military said a missile strike destroyed a weapons cache inside a known al-Qaeda safe house.
A suicide truck bomber killed 78 people when he rammed his vehicle into a Shi’ite mosque in Baghdad on Tuesday, just hours after the United States military deployed 10Â 000 soldiers in a major offensive. The offensive around the city of Baquba in Diyala province is partly aimed at taking down al-Qaeda car-bomb networks.
Two days of fierce fighting between gunmen loyal to Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Iraqi police have killed 35 people and wounded 125 in the southern city of Nassiriya, a hospital doctor said on Tuesday. The clashes erupted on Sunday night when police attacked a Sadr office in Nassiriya in an apparent response to an attack that wounded a local police commander.
Three Sunni Muslim mosques were attacked and burned south of Baghdad on Thursday, Iraqi police said, in apparent reprisal attacks after suspected al-Qaeda militants blew up the minarets of a revered Shi’ite shrine. Tens of thousands of soldiers were on the streets of Baghdad and other cities enforcing curfews imposed after Wednesday’s bombing.
Suspected al-Qaeda militants blew up two minarets of a revered Shi’ite mosque in the Iraqi city of Samarra on Wednesday, targeting a shrine bombed last year in an attack that unleashed a wave of sectarian killing. Fearing renewed bloodshed, Iraq’s government imposed an indefinite curfew in Baghdad as Shi’ite and Sunni political and religious leaders called for calm.
Gunmen attacked the home of a police chief north of Baghdad on Friday, killing 14 people including his wife and brothers, and kidnapping his four children, police sources said. South of the capital, a minibus packed with weapons and exlosives blew up at a bus terminal in a market in the town of Qurna.
A suicide car bomber killed 10 people and wounded 30 in a busy market in a volatile region north-east of Baghdad on Sunday, police said. The bomber targeted a convoy of police vehicles as it drove through a market area in the town of Balad Ruz, about 50km south-east of Diyala province’s capital Baquba.
Two more United States soldiers have been killed in Iraq, the military announced on Thursday, confirming that May had become the deadliest month for American forces in two-and-a-half years. Meanwhile, the hunt was continuing for five Britons who were snatched at gunpoint from a Finance Ministry building in the capital earlier this week.
Gunmen in police uniforms kidnapped five Britons from a government building in Baghdad on Tuesday and the deaths of 10 United States soldiers were announced, making May the deadliest month this year for the US military. The gunmen seized the Britons from a Finance Ministry building in eastern Baghdad.
The United States urged Iran on Monday to stop supporting militias in Iraq in the most high-profile meeting between the two countries in almost 30 years, which both sides later described as positive. The rare talks in Baghdad were narrowly focused on Iraq’s spiralling sectarian violence and did not touch on Iran’s controversial nuclear programme.
Five United States soldiers were killed in four separate attacks across Iraq on Thursday, most of them by roadside bombs, the US military said on Friday. The US military also reported the death of another soldier on Tuesday in a roadside bomb attack near Tikrit, 175km north of Baghdad.
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.
A bomber wearing a suicide vest killed 20 people and wounded 30 in a cafe in a volatile province northeast of Baghdad on Wednesday, police said. The attack took place in Mandali, a mainly Shi’ite Kurd town about 100km north-east of Baghdad near the Iranian border.
Twenty-five people were killed and 60 wounded when a car bomb tore through a busy market area in south-western Baghdad on Tuesday, police said. At least two buildings were completely destroyed and many others badly damaged when the bomb went off near a popular outdoor market in Amil, a mostly Shi’ite district.
Britain’s Tony Blair, on his last visit to Iraq as prime minister, said on Saturday he had no regrets about his part in the United States-led invasion that removed Saddam Hussein. On a farewell trip to a country whose future may define his legacy after a decade in power, Blair met Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani.
A truck bomb laden with chlorine gas exploded in a market area in a mostly Shi’ite town north of Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 45 people and wounding 60, police said on Wednesday. The attack in volatile Diyala province took place in a market area in the town of Abu Sayda, a source said in the police headquarters in Diyala’s capital of Baquba. News of the attack did not emerge until Wednesday.
Thousands of American troops searched on Sunday for three US soldiers missing in Iraq after an ambush in which al-Qaeda said it seized ”crusader” forces. The self-styled Islamic State in Iraq, a group led by al-Qaeda, said in an internet posting it was holding soldiers who survived an attack south of Baghdad.
A car bomb near the office of a leading Kurdish party in northern Iraq killed 30 people and wounded 50 others on Sunday, police said. The blast took place near the local office of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Makhmour, a town near the Kurdish city of Arbil, the capital of the autonomous region of Kurdistan.
United States-led troops combed orchards and searched farms after seven American soldiers and an Iraqi army interpreter were ambushed on Saturday in an al-Qaeda bastion south of Baghdad, leaving five dead and three missing. The military said the patrol was attacked before dawn west of the town of Mahmudiya in the Sunni ”triangle of death”.
Two suicide car bombers killed 25 people and wounded dozens more near Iraq’s city of Ramadi on Monday in separate attacks that police blamed on al-Qaeda. The violence in Anbar came a day after eight US soldiers were killed in Iraq, including six who died along with a freelance Russian photographer in a roadside bomb attack.