A suicide car bomb struck an Iraqi police patrol yesterday in the northern city of Mosul, killing at least two people and wounding four, police said.
A roadside bomb also struck a car carrying members of a private security company in Kirkuk, 290km north of Baghdad, killing one person and wounding three others. Firefighters arriving at the site to help also were hit by a roadside bomb, which wounded two of them, Colonel Nashat Shawish said.
In Baghdad, a bomb exploded in a bus garage in the center of the capital, killing two people and wounding 10, Lieutenant Bilal Ali said. The buses in the garage were primarily used to take passengers to the Shiite slum of Sadr City.
Iraqi police in eastern Baghdad found the body of a man who was shot in the head, Lieutenant Raad Abdul-Hussein said.
Elsewhere in the capital city, gunmen killed an employee of the Dora refinery in a drive-by shooting, while an intelligence captain in the Interior Ministry was seriously wounded when gunmen opened fire on his car in the volatile neighborhood, according to Lieutenant Maithem Abdul-Razzaq.
Gunmen in a speeding car also opened fire on a Shiite family as they were walking to the market in a southwestern neighborhood in the capital, killing a 12-year-old boy and wounding his brother and two other relatives, he said.
A roadside bomb missed a police patrol in eastern Baghdad but killed one civilian and wounded four others, Major Mahir Mohammed said.
A bomb hidden in a bag also exploded in a market in central Baghdad, wounding seven people, Ali said.
About 1,500 Iraqi soldiers, meanwhile, fanned out near Muqdadiyah in Diyala Province as part of an operation to clear the area of insurgents, Brigadier General Ahmed al-Awad said.
Four cars and a motorcycle packed with explosives had been seized and 14 suspected insurgents were detained, al-Awad said. He also said two kidnapped civilians were released during the operation.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said yesterday that he would demand an independent Iraqi inquiry into the suspected rape and murder of a teenager and the killing of her family by US soldiers.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing