Two suicide attackers detonated car bombs in northern Iraq yesterday, killing at least five Iraqis and wounding 40, hospital and police officials said, as raging violence claimed more than 20 lives during the past 24 hours across Iraq.
The bombs exploded at an entrance to an Iraqi military base in Sinjar, about 120km northwest of Mosul, said a police official.
The bodies of least five Iraqis killed in the attack were brought to Sinjar Hospital, said a hospital official, and 40 people were wounded.
PHOTO: AP
More than 20 people have been killed across Iraq during the past 24 hours, all victims of a raging, increasingly sectarian insurgency that US-backed authorities are struggling to put down.
Yesterday, Japan's Foreign Ministry said in Tokyo that it is trying to verify if a dead Asian man pictured in Internet photos is a Japanese hostage in Iraq. Late Friday, the Japanese news agency reported a Web site claim by Sunni militant group Ansar al-Sunnah Army that Akihiko Saito had died and said the group had posted pictures of the bloodied victim. Saito, a security consultant, has been missing in Iraq since his convoy was ambushed early in May. He worked for Hart Security Ltd, a British security firm.
Ten Iraqis were killed and their bodies dumped in the volatile western border city of Qaim after returning from a pilgrimage to a holy site in neighboring Syria, police said yesterday. Relatives of five of the victims told police the group had been visiting the Sayda Zeinab Shiite Muslim shrine in Damascus and returned via the Waleed border crossing.
At a funeral yesterday for four of the victims in the predominantly Shiite Muslim city of Diwaniyah, 170km south of Baghdad, many of the 150 mourners chanted "revenge, revenge" as they followed four coffins draped in Iraq's red, white and black flags.
Violence continued throughout cities south of Baghdad in a region dubbed the Triangle of Death, where scores of bodies have been found in an apparent tit-for-tat wave of sectarian violence.
Two civilians were killed and three injured when clashes erupted late Friday between militants and Iraqi soldiers in Mahmoudiya, about 30km south of Baghdad.
Gunmen killed another five people Friday during a car exhibition in the nearby city of Latifiyah.
Ali said police have also found the bullet-riddled bodies of five Iraqis in a car on a road in the volatile Anbar province, before they were returned to their home city of Hillah, 95km south of Baghdad.
A suicide car bomb attack on a police patrol instead killed three civilians Friday in Tikrit, north of Baghdad. Six policemen were among 18 people wounded.
North of Baghdad in Kirkuk, Sheik Sabhan Khalaf al-Jibouri, a moderate Sunni Muslim tribal leader with close ties to Iraqi Kurds, was killed Friday in a hail of machine-gun fire.
In the capital, gunmen killed a western Baghdad tribal leader Samir Abdel Laith and real estate agent Sheik Samir Abdul-Razziq in separate drive-by shootings Friday in the western Jihad neighborhood.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS