Jay Deshmukh

United States forces have arrested a top Iraqi militant who acted as a link between al-Qaeda’s Iraqi offshoot and Osama bin Laden, the global jihadist network’s Saudi founder, the US military said on Wednesday. Brigadier General Kevin Bergner said American troops had arrested Khaled al-Mashhadani on July 4 in the northern city of Mosul.

Two double bomb attacks killed at least 35 people in Iraq on Friday, while gunmen raided the home of a police chief, massacring his wife, brother and 12 bodyguards and seizing his children. A twin bomb attack on a Shi’ite mosque near the northern oil city of Kirkuk killed at least 19 people and wounded 22, police and medical officials said.

Insurgents slaughtered another 47 Iraqis on Sunday, including 23 members of a small religious minority dragged from a bus and gunned down by the roadside, security officials said. The latest day of carnage came as the United States military said it would press on with plans to wall in Baghdad’s worst neighbourhoods despite criticism from residents.

An Iranian diplomat has been kidnapped in the Iraqi capital, Tehran said on Tuesday, as security forces pressed on with troop deployments in Baghdad ahead of a United States-Iraqi crackdown to curb raging violence. As the troops took up positions in Baghdad, violence continued in Iraq with at least five people killed and four others found murdered, Iraqi security officials said.

Police found dozens of bullet-riddled corpses in Baghdad on Wednesday, and two car bombs killed 28 people and wounded scores more in the Iraqi capital as a wave of sectarian violence ravaged the country. At least 69 bodies were recovered in the past 24 hours from across Iraq, including 64 from Baghdad, many of them shot dead execution-style, security officials said.

Iraq’s leadership, including the Sunni Arab camp involved in efforts to forge a unity government, on Wednesday jointly condemned the defiant battle cry from al-Qaeda frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. "Al-Zarqawi has launched a genocide against the Iraqi people, branding the Shi’ites as rawafidh [rejectionists], the Kurds as traitors, and the Sunni Arabs as renegades," said President Jalal Talabani .

Car bombings and shootings in Baghdad on Monday left 15 dead and 100 wounded as Washington stepped up pressure for Shi’ite premier-designate Jawad al-Maliki to form a government and halt Iraq’s slide into a civil war. Insurgents set off seven car bombs, including a double car bombing at a Baghdad university, security officials said.

The trial of Saddam Hussein on charges of crimes against humanity resumed on Wednesday for a brief ten minute session without the deposed leader or any of the other seven defendants present. Chief Judge Rauf Abdel Rahman adjourned the session to April 17 after the shortest session of the trial since it began in October.

Rebels killed four United States marines and at least six Iraqis died in attacks on Tuesday amid a tight security clampdown ahead of the major Shi’ite Muslim ceremony of Ashura, a favourite target of Sunni insurgents. The marines were killed in the two rebel strikes in the western province of al-Anbar.