Eight United States soldiers were killed in Iraq on Sunday, including six who died along with a European journalist in a roadside bomb attack north of Baghdad, the US military said. Earlier, a car bomb killed 35 people and wounded 80 next to a crowded market in a Shi’ite district of Baghdad.
A car bomb killed at least 35 people and wounded 80 on Sunday next to a crowded market in a Shi’ite district of Baghdad which has been a repeated target of attacks blamed on Sunni Muslim al-Qaeda. Bystanders used blankets to carry the dead and wounded onto pick-up trucks.
United States-led forces conducting a crackdown on al-Qaeda killed a senior member of the insurgent group who was responsible for the high-profile kidnappings of several Westerners, a military spokesperson said on Thursday. Meanwhile, a rocket attack on Iraq’s Green Zone on Wednesday killed four foreign contractors.
The Iraqi government and its tribal allies were scouring dangerous territory on Wednesday for evidence to prove their claims that al-Qaeda’s Iraq chief had been killed in a clash between armed factions. A claim on Tuesday that Abu Ayyub al-Masri had been killed was scorned by al-Qaeda.
The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was killed on Tuesday in an internal fight between militants north of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry spokesperson said. Brigadier General Abdul Kareem Khalaf said ”we have definite intelligence reports that al-Masri was killed today”. He said the battle happened near a bridge in the small town of al-Nibayi, north of Baghdad.
A suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives killed more than 20 people when he blew himself up among mourners at a Shi’ite funeral north of Baghdad on Monday, Iraqi police said. Also, five US soldiers were killed in Iraq over the weekend, raising the number of American troops killed this month to more than 100.
United States forces fired an artillery barrage in southern Baghdad on Sunday morning, rocking the capital with loud explosions. Meanwhile, the death toll from a suicide car bomb attack in the Shi’ite holy city of Karbala rose to 68 as residents dug through the debris of heavily damaged shops.
The United Nations accused Iraq on Wednesday of withholding sensitive civilian casualty figures because it fears they would be used to paint a ”very grim” picture of a worsening humanitarian crisis. Violence continued as a suicide attacker walked into a police station in volatile Diyala province and detonated a bomb, killing nine, police said.
A suicide car bomber struck a United States military outpost north of Baghdad, killing nine soldiers and wounding 20 others, in the deadliest attack on American ground forces in Iraq in 16 months. In an attack claimed by al-Qaeda, the bomb exploded against a patrol base in the restive province of Diyala on Monday.
Two suicide car bombers rammed their vehicles into an Iraqi police station in south-western Baghdad on Sunday, killing 10 people and wounding 75, police said. The attack in the mostly Shi’ite al-Bayaa neighbourhood was one of the deadliest against Iraqi security forces in the capital since a United States-backed security crackdown was launched in mid-February.
The United States military intends to proceed with its plan to erect concrete walls around Baghdad hot spots, the military said, even as one such experiment in a dangerous Sunni enclave faces criticism. Brigadier General John Campbell said these walls aimed to protect the people from ”terrorists” and the ”intent is not to divide the city along sectarian lines”.
It seems that massacres at American schools and universities are becoming as traditional as the Fourth of July, or, as one newspaper put it, apple pie.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Tuesday the withdrawal of ministers loyal to Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has not weakened his government and he will name technocrats to replace them soon. In the biggest Cabinet shake-up since al-Maliki took office a year ago, six Sadrist ministers pulled out of the government on Monday.
Multimillionaires Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal may be upset over ATP reforms, but their problems are nothing compared with those encountered by tennis players in Iraq. Even putting together a team for next month’s Davis Cup Group IV Asia/Oceania tie in Burma is an achievement, as three of their group were murdered last August.
Radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr pulled his six ministers out of Iraq’s beleaguered coalition government on Monday as he pushed his demand for a rapid withdrawal of United States troops from the country. The Shi’ite hard-liner was angered last week when street protests failed to persuade Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to set a timeline for US forces to go home.
Up to 21 people were killed and about 60 wounded in bomb attacks in two Shi’ite districts of Baghdad on Sunday, police said, while two British military personnel died when two helicopters crashed north of the city. The United States. military said two soldiers died and five were injured when the helicopters crashed near a large U.S. air base in Taji, 20km from Baghdad.
A suicide bomber killed eight people in the Iraqi Parliament on Thursday, slipping through multiple checkpoints in a brazen strike that challenged a major United States-backed security crackdown in Baghdad. The blast tore through a café where lawmakers were having lunch. State television said three of the dead were lawmakers.
An explosion rocked a restaurant inside the Iraqi Parliament in Baghdad while lawmakers were having lunch on Thursday and local media said two were killed. If confirmed as a bomb, the blast would represent one of the worst security breaches of the heavily fortified Green Zone.
A truck bomb killed eight people on a bridge in Baghdad on Thursday and sent several cars plunging into the Tigris River below, Iraqi police said. Police said the blast, which occurred during the morning rush hour, had damaged the Sarafiya bridge in northern Baghdad. One of its steel girders had collapsed.
A woman veiled in black and strapped with explosives blew herself up outside a police station in Iraq on Tuesday, killing 16 people, many of them looking for jobs in the police force. The bombing occurred in the restive town of Muqdadiyah, in the flashpoint province of Diyala, which is now considered the second most dangerous area of Iraq after Baghdad itself.
A suspected al-Qaeda in Iraq suicide bomber smashed a truck loaded with TNT and toxic chlorine gas into a police checkpoint in Ramadi, killing at least 27 people — the ninth such attack since the group’s first known use of a chemical weapon in January.
Prosecutors on Monday sought the death penalty for Saddam Hussein’s cousin, widely known as ”Chemical Ali”, for his use of poison gas against the regime’s opponents and once one of the most feared men in Iraq. Ali Hassan al-Majeed is on trial with five other former senior Ba’ath party officials for their roles in the 1988 Anfal (Spoils of War) campaign.
Nearly 400 people have been killed over the past three days in Iraq as insurgents and sectarian militias ripped through a massive United States security crackdown concentrated around Baghdad. A series of coordinated bombings of Shi’ite marketplaces in and north of the capital defied a latest plea from embattled Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
Multiple car bombs exploded at about the same time and killed at least 40 people in a mainly Shi’ite town north of Baghdad on Thursday, officials said. A hospital source said in addition to the 40 dead, at least 80 more people were wounded in the blasts. One witness reported seeing at least eight people killed in one of the blasts.
Gunmen stormed a Sunni district in the north-western Iraqi town of Tal Afar overnight, killing dozens in apparent reprisal for deadly truck bombings in a Shi’ite area, Iraqi officials said on Wednesday. Police, military and health officials said as many as 50 men were killed in the attack on the Sunni district of al-Wahda in the volatile town.
United States forces in Iraq said on Tuesday they had arrested two leaders of a network suspected of killing about 900 civilians in a series of high-profile car bomb attacks. Haytham Kazim Abdallah al-Shimari and Haydar Rashid Nasir al-Shammari al-Jafar were arrested separately on March 21 in Baghdad’s Sunni district of Adhamiyah.
Suicide bombers struck in Baghdad and to the west and south of the capital on Saturday in a string of attacks on mostly Iraqi police targets that killed more than 30 people and wounded dozens, most of them policemen. In the worst attack, a man driving a truck packed with explosives blew up outside a police station in Baghdad’s volatile southern district of Dora, killing 20.
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zobaie was wounded and undergoing surgery after a suicide bomber blew himself up in a hall where he was attending prayers on Friday, police and security officials said. Six of Zobaie’s guards were killed in the second assassination attempt on a senior member of the United States-backed government in a month.
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was unharmed but ducked behind the podium after a rocket landed near Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office on Thursday while the two men were speaking to reporters at a news conference. An Associate Press reporter ran outside and saw a crater 1m in diameter.
Iraqi security forces killed 39 ”terrorists” in a fierce battle in the western Sunni province of al-Anbar on Tuesday, a top Iraqi official told the media. Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf, director of the operations centre in the Interior Ministry, said seven other militants were arrested, including some Arab nationals.
Iraq sent another of Saddam Hussein’s former henchmen to the gallows on Tuesday as the nation marked the fourth anniversary of the United States-led war still battling a raging insurgency and sectarian conflict. Former vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan was executed before dawn for crimes against humanity over the killing of 148 Shi’ites in the 1980s.
Bombers detonated explosives on three trucks carrying a toxic gas amid traffic in western Iraq, killing at least two police and leaving 350 civilians needing treatment, the United States military said on Saturday. All three attacks were carried out between 4.11pm and 7.13pm local time on Friday