Baghdad

Two suicide bombers killed 61 people and wounded 150 when they blew themselves up at a crowded market in Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslim town of Hilla on Thursday, police said. The blasts, along with bomb and mortar attacks in Baghdad that killed 11 people, underscored the challenges for the government of Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Six months after the United States invasion of Iraq, Esam Pasha, a 30-year-old Iraqi artist and writer, proudly painted a mural called Resilience over a giant portrait of Saddam Hussein on the wall of a government building. Now he lives in the US. Pasha is among hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been driven abroad since the war whose skills Iraq can ill afford to lose.

Iraqi civilian deaths in political violence reached a new high in January, data from an Interior Ministry official showed on Thursday. The statistics, widely viewed as an indicative but only partial record of violent deaths, showed 1 971 people died from ”terrorism” in January, slightly up from the previous high of 1 930 deaths recorded in December 2006.

The death toll from a suicide bomb that hit Shi’ite worshippers marking the climax of the Ashura religious festival in a town north-east of Baghdad on Tuesday has risen to 23, with 57 wounded. Doctor Yassir Ahmed of Baladruz hospital said the bomb was at a Shi’ite mosque in an area of Baladruz called Dur Mandali.

United States helicopters attacked gunmen holed up inside high-rise buildings in Baghdad on Wednesday in what the US military said was an operation to regain control of a major street cutting through the heart of the city. Thirty suspected insurgents were killed and 35 more detained during day-long gun battles in the area, Defence Ministry spokesperson Mohammed al-Askari said.

The United States military said on Monday 93 rebels were killed and 57 captured in a 10-day operation against al-Qaeda-linked insurgents north-east of Baghdad. In an unusually detailed video news conference broadcast to journalists in Baghdad, Colonel David Sutherland said Iraqi troops had fought well in the operation and were improving their capabilities every day.

Two car bombs ripped through a busy commercial area of central Baghdad on Monday, killing 65 people and wounding 110, the Interior Ministry said. After a relative lull in violence in the capital at the weekend, the car bombs exploded simultaneously in the Bab al-Sharji area just after midday.

The Iraqi government on Thursday rejected as ”superficial” and ”unprofessional” a United Nations report this week that said 34 000 civilians were killed in Iraq last year, but it did not directly reject the figure itself. Spokesperson Ali al-Dabbagh also criticised a UN call for protection for homosexuals, who say they are targeted by Islamic militants.

At least 10 people were killed and 25 wounded in a series of car bombings in Baghdad on Thursday, the third day in a surge in insurgent violence in the Iraqi capital. Three bombs in quick succession killed at least six people and wounded 15 in a wholesale vegetable market in the violent southern district of Dora, police said.

A roadside bomb followed by a blast from a motorcycle rigged with explosives killed 15 people and wounded 70 near a Sunni mosque in central Baghdad on Tuesday, an interior ministry source said. A hospital source said at least 11 bodies and many wounded had been brought to the hospital.

Iraqi government officials showed journalists film of Monday’s execution of two aides to Saddam Hussein in which they appear to tremble with fear and his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti is beheaded by the noose. The pair stand side by side on what appears to be the same gallows where Saddam was hanged two weeks ago.

The United States plans to ”go after” what it said are networks of Iranian and Syrian agents in Iraq, US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said on Monday. ”We’re going after their networks in Iraq,” he told a news conference, as he laid out the new US and Iraqi strategy to end sectarian violence — by both Sunnis and Shi’ites — at what Khalilzad called a ”defining moment” for Iraq.

Streets were quiet in a Baghdad district where United States and Iraqi forces killed 50 people in a major battle as President George Bush prepared on Wednesday to unveil a plan to send more troops to turn the war around. Iraqi troops sealed off some areas in Haifa Street, a Sunni Arab stronghold, but fighting from a major US and Iraqi operation to rid the area of ”terrorist hideouts” had ended.

United States and Iraqi forces killed 50 people on Tuesday in raids on a Sunni Arab district they described as riddled with ”terrorist hideouts” and a hotbed of insurgent activity by foreign fighters linked to al-Qaeda. Defence Ministry spokesperson Major General Ibrahim Shakir said 50 had been killed and 21 people arrested in the operation around Haifa Street.

United States and Iraqi forces clashed with gunmen in central Baghdad on Tuesday, coming under fire from mortars and rocket-propelled grenades during raids in an area the US military said was a hotbed of insurgent activity. US fighter jets screamed over the city with unusual intensity and military helicopters were seen hovering above Haifa Street.

A new video has been posted on the internet, apparently showing the body of Saddam Hussein lying on a hospital trolley with a wound in his neck after being hanged. The 27-second clip is the third illicit film to emerge since the former Iraqi president was executed for crimes against humanity on December 30.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Saturday threatened to ”review” relations with countries which have criticised the bungled execution of Saddam Hussein, saying the hanging was an internal matter. ”The Iraqi government could be obliged to review its relations with any state that fails to respect the wish of the Iraqi people,” said Maliki.

United States President George Bush said Saddam Hussein could have been hanged in a ”more dignified way” and one his closest Arab allies said on Friday a video of Shi’ite officials taunting him on the gallows was ”barbaric”. Bush said he expected the Iraqi government to conduct a full investigation, but said the ousted leader was given justice.

Investigators have identified two guards who illicitly filmed Saddam Hussein’s execution, an official said on Thursday, as the Iraqi government sought to dampen growing outrage from Sunni Arabs over the unruly hanging. The mobile-phone video of Shi’ite officials taunting Saddam on the gallows has inflamed sectarian passions in a country on the brink of civil war.