The blast walls that have divided Baghdad communities since the US-led invasion in 2003 will be removed within 40 days, Iraq said on Wednesday.
Iraq’s Cabinet was reviewing on Wednesday new bids from foreign energy firms to develop the country’s oil and gas reserves.
A bomber killed 67 people on Saturday, shortly after the prime minister urged Iraqis not to lose faith if a US pull-back sparked more violence.
The head of the Iraqi Parliament’s biggest Sunni Muslim bloc was killed at a mosque on Friday, officials said.
Media watchdogs have urged Iraq’s government to end harassment and intimidation of journalists and push for the release of a freelance photographer.
Former insurgents recruited by US forces to fight al-Qaeda are plotting to launch terror attacks of their own, Iraq’s vice president said on Tuesday.
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/ 31 January 2009
Iraqis voted behind barbed wire and rings of police on Saturday in an election that tested the war-battered country’s fragile security gains.
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/ 18 December 2008
Iraq has arrested about 50 interior ministry officials for plotting a coup against the Shi’ite-led government, it was reported on Thursday.
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/ 13 December 2008
The top US commander in Iraq said on Saturday that some US may remain in Iraqi cities after next June, even though a pact calls for their withdrawal.
Iraq and the US have agreed that a planned security pact will require all US troops to leave by the end of 2011, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki says.
US President George Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki have agreed on ”a general time horizon” for a drawdown of US forces.
The US military faced Iraqi anger on Sunday over a raid near Kerbala in which a distant relative of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was killed.
The United States military fired rockets at a target near a hospital in eastern Baghdad on Saturday, wounding 20 people. No patients were wounded at the hospital in the Sadr City stronghold of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, but 20 people at the scene of the blasts were wounded.
More than 900 people have been killed in clashes between militiamen and security forces in Baghdad’s Sadr City, which broke out last month, a senior Iraqi official told reporters on Wednesday. ”There were 925 martyrs in Sadr City and 2 605 others have been wounded”, said Tehseen Sheikhly, a spokesperson for the government’s Baghdad security plan.
Militants bombarded Baghdad’s Green Zone with rockets on Sunday, taking advantage of the cover of a blinding dust storm to launch one of the heaviest strikes in weeks on the fortified compound. The strikes appeared to defy a renewed call for a ceasefire by Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which has seen many of his masked gunmen leave the streets of the Sadr City slum.
Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr pulled back from confrontation with the government on Friday, asking his followers to continue to observe a shaky ceasefire and not to battle government troops. Sadr said his recent threat of ”open war” was directed only at United States forces, not the Iraqi government.
Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Saturday threatened an ”open war” against the Iraqi government unless it halted a crackdown by Iraqi and United States security forces on his followers. The spectre of a full-scale uprising by Sadr sharply raises the stakes in his confrontation with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of mourners in northern Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 50 people, a police officer said. The man detonated an explosives vest in the crowd in the Sunni Arab village of Bu Mohammed, 120km south of the oil city of Kirkuk, at about 11am local time, Captain Abdullah Jassim said.
United States and Iraqi forces killed 13 gunmen in clashes and air strikes overnight in the Baghdad stronghold of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who said the US would remain his enemy until the ”last drop of my blood”. Authorities eased a blockade on Saturday in the Sadr City district of eastern Baghdad that had trapped residents in the slum for two weeks.
President George Bush on Thursday announced a suspension of United States troop withdrawals from Iraq this summer to allow the military to reassess the security situation. The announcement came amid a spike in violence in Iraq in recent weeks.
United States air strikes killed 10 people in the eastern Baghdad militia stronghold of Sadr City, Iraqi police said on Thursday, but street fighting eased after four days of clashes that have killed close to 90 people. The Sadr City slum has since Sunday been the focal point of battles between black-masked Mehdi Army militiamen and security forces.
Hillary Clinton hit out at Democratic White House rival Barack Obama over Iraq on Wednesday, as a report by war commander General David Petraeus ignited new campaign brush fires. The New York senator questioned whether Obama could live up to his pledge to bring United States troops home and lashed out at Republican nominee John McCain.
Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr threatened on Tuesday to end a truce he imposed on his militia last year, raising the prospect of worsening violence in Iraq just hours before top US officials testified on Iraq in Washington. Al-Sadr urged his Mehdi Army to ”continue your jihad and resistance” against US forces.
The top United States general and diplomat in Iraq testify in politically charged hearings in Congress on Tuesday, and face a grilling from three senators vying to inherit the war as the next US president. General David Petraeus and ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker will appear to update progress in the war.
Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr will consult senior religious leaders and disband his Mehdi Army militia if they instruct him to, a senior aide said on Monday. The surprise announcement was the first time Sadr has proposed dissolving the Mehdi Army, one of the principle actors in Iraq’s five-year-old conflict.
Iraq’s prime minister has raised the stakes in his showdown with followers of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, saying in an interview broadcast on Monday they would be barred from elections unless their militia disbanded. The comments followed raids on Sunday by security forces into the cleric’s Baghdad stronghold, the slum of Sadr City.
The number of Iraqis killed in March climbed to 1 082, mostly civilians, the highest monthly figure since August, amid a spike in violence driven by clashes between Shi’ite militiamen and security forces, officials said on Tuesday. The figure confirms a reversal of the trend of gradually decreasing violence since June.
United States air strikes and military assaults have killed 41 ”criminals” in Baghdad, including 25 who died when an alleged mortar team was bombed, the US military announced on Monday. The killings occurred on Sunday in eastern and north-eastern Baghdad where US and Iraqi forces have been battling the Mehdi Army militia
The United States confirmed on Sunday that US special forces units were operating alongside Iraqi government troops in Basra, where the government is battling militants loyal to Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The Iraqi special forces team killed four suspected militants in a house and two on a roof before calling in an air strike.
Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, on Wednesday gave Shi’ite militia and other gunmen a 72-hour deadline to surrender their weapons as his forces engaged in fierce street battles in the southern city of Basra for the second day running. The violence in Basra and Baghdad has killed more than 70 people, according to Iraqi officials and news agency reports.
United States Vice-President Dick Cheney, an architect of the US-led invasion of Iraq, made an unannounced visit to Baghdad on Monday to assess the success of a troop build-up five years after the war began. Cheney arrived as Republican candidate John McCain, who will be the Republican choice in November’s presidential election, was meeting Iraqi leaders.
Kidnappers of a Chaldean Catholic archbishop found dead in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul had demanded a -million ransom, a senior police official said on Friday. Paulos Faraj Rahho, the archbishop of Mosul, 390km north of Baghdad, was abducted on February 29 after gunmen attacked his car and killed his driver and two guards.