UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan arrived in Baghdad yesterday for a meeting with Iraqi leaders while a car bomb exploded outside a public market in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood of New Baghdad, killing four and injuring 19.
In New Baghdad, two men, a woman and her eight-year-old daughter were killed in the blast, which also set off a large fire in the market, police Colonel Hassan Chaloub said.
Government spokesman Laith Kubba said Annan met with Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
A UN statement said Annan would meet with al-Jaafari, Deputy Prime Minister Rowsh Shaways, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, political and community leaders as well as UN staff.
On Friday, al-Jaafari demanded that Syria do more to keep foreign fighters from crossing into western Iraq, where US troops are battling al-Qaeda-led forces after a meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza. On Thursday he met with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
Both Rice and Straw said they wanted to encourage participation in parliamentary elections scheduled for Dec. 15. In addition to meeting with Iraq's Shiite leadership, they also met with political leaders from the Sunni minority.
The leaders of Iraq's predominantly Sunni insurgency have called for a boycott of the election. But a Sunni Muslim politician who claims to have contacts with insurgent groups said on Saturday some of its members will be running next month's elections and gave their demands and conditions to start peace talks with US forces.
Ayham al-Samarie refused to say how many insurgents groups were planning to have candidates. He did not give further details and insurgent groups in the past have denied he represents them.
"The resistance should have an active role to help Iraq get out of its crisis," al-Samarie, a former electricity minister, told reporters.
Minutes before al-Samarie spoke, a statement was distributed in his house that allegedly included the resistance's conditions to start peace talks. The conditions included an immediate end to all military operations, release of all detainees, the withdrawal of foreign troops from cities and setting a time table for the full withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq.
In Baghdad late Friday, gunmen fired on the compound of the Embassy of Oman, killing two people and wounding two others -- the second fatal shooting involving employees of Arab embassies in Baghdad this week. One of the dead was a policeman and the other was an embassy employee.
On Wednesday, a driver for the Sudanese Embassy was shot to death in the same part of the capital, and last month two employees of the Moroccan Embassy were abducted on a highway in western Iraq.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for abducting the Moroccans, as well as for the July kidnap-slaying of three Arab diplomats -- two Algerians and one Egyptian -- in Baghdad.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
RSS