Militants blew up 13 cars in three hours, wounding at least 20 people, while 13 Iraqis were killed in other violence yesterday and on Sunday.
Yesterday's worst bloodshed came in eastern Baghdad, where police said gunmen killed five people at a butcher shop and a bomb killed two police officers at a gas station.
Two more Iraqis were slain and five wounded by gunfire at a Sunni mosque in southern Baghdad, while a Shiite sheik was fatally shot at a market in the same part of the city.
In the northern city of Mosul, about a dozen gunmen attacked a police checkpoint, killing a bystander and wounding three policemen, police said.
Eight of the cars bombs exploded in Baghdad and wounded a total of 11 people, police said. Officers later destroyed a ninth car bomb that failed to go off.
A suicide car bomber near Tikrit injured six civilians, and in the northern city of Kirkuk, a bomb aimed at an Iraqi police convoy wounded three civilians, police said. Other car bombings in Kirkuk and in Muqdadiyah caused no injuries.
A gasoline shortage because of insurgents' threats against tanker-truck drivers has added to the unease. Police killed two protesters in oil-rich Kirkuk on Sunday when a demonstration by 500 people over rising fuel prices escalated into a riot. Authorities imposed a curfew on the city.
Elsewhere, Sunni Arabs made their opening bid on Sunday in what could be protracted negotiations to form a new government. Leaders of the minority's main political group, the Iraqi Accordance Front, traveled to the northern city of Irbil for a meeting yesterday with the president of the Kurdish region.
The Kurdish region in Iraq's north already has seen a flurry of postelection bargaining between Kurds and the governing Shiite Muslim religious party, the United Iraqi Alliance.
Preliminary results from the Dec. 15 election gave the Shiite group a strong lead in the voting for Iraq's 275-member parliament, but not enough for it to govern without other political blocs.
A year ago, it took nearly three months of negotiations between the Shiite religious alliance and a coalition of Kurdish parties to form an interim government after a Jan. 30 election that was boycotted by the Sunni Arabs at the core of the insurgency.
Early 2006 looks more crucial as Iraq tries to shape an administration that will govern for four years. US officials are pushing the parties to form a broad-based coalition government.
"This is perceived, inappropriately or inaccurately perhaps, by the enemy as a time of vulnerability, as the government transitions from its transitional government to a permanent government, to the constitutional-based, democratically elected four-year permanent government," said Brigadier General Donald Alston, spokesman for the US-led coalition force.
‘HYANGDO’: A South Korean lawmaker said there was no credible evidence to support rumors that Kim Jong-un has a son with a disability or who is studying abroad South Korea’s spy agency yesterday said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s daughter, Kim Ju-ae, who last week accompanied him on a high-profile visit to Beijing, is understood to be his recognized successor. The teenager drew global attention when she made her first official overseas trip with her father, as he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Analysts have long seen her as Kim’s likely successor, although some have suggested she has an older brother who is being secretly groomed as the next leader. The South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) “assesses that she [Kim Ju-ae]
In the week before his fatal shooting, right-wing US political activist Charlie Kirk cheered the boom of conservative young men in South Korea and warned about a “globalist menace” in Tokyo on his first speaking tour of Asia. Kirk, 31, who helped amplify US President Donald Trump’s agenda to young voters with often inflammatory rhetoric focused on issues such as gender and immigration, was shot in the neck on Wednesday at a speaking event at a Utah university. In Seoul on Friday last week, he spoke about how he “brought Trump to victory,” while addressing Build Up Korea 2025, a conservative conference
DEADLOCK: Putin has vowed to continue fighting unless Ukraine cedes more land, while talks have been paused with no immediate results expected, the Kremlin said Russia on Friday said that peace talks with Kyiv were on “pause” as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin still wanted to capture the whole of Ukraine. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said that he was running out of patience with Putin, and the NATO alliance said it would bolster its eastern front after Russian drones were shot down in Polish airspace this week. The latest blow to faltering diplomacy came as Russia’s army staged major military drills with its key ally Belarus. Despite Trump forcing the warring sides to hold direct talks and hosting Putin in Alaska, there
North Korea has executed people for watching or distributing foreign television shows, including popular South Korean dramas, as part of an intensifying crackdown on personal freedoms, a UN human rights report said on Friday. Surveillance has grown more pervasive since 2014 with the help of new technologies, while punishments have become harsher — including the introduction of the death penalty for offences such as sharing foreign TV dramas, the report said. The curbs make North Korea the most restrictive country in the world, said the 14-page UN report, which was based on interviews with more than 300 witnesses and victims who had
RSS