A suicide car bomber sped toward US soldiers as they gave candy to children and detonated his vehicle yesterday, killing up to 27 other people, US and Iraqi officials said. One US soldier and about a dozen children were among the dead.
At least 70 others, including three US soldiers, were injured in the attack, Iraqi and US officials said. It was the second major suicide bombing in Baghdad this week. A suicide bomber killed 25 people on Sunday at an army recruiting center.
The fireball from yesterday's blast also set a nearby house on fire, the US military said. The attack stunned the impoverished east Baghdad neighborhood of mostly Shiite Muslims and Christians. An elderly woman dressed in traditional black beat her chest in front of her house in grief.
The vehicle used in the attack was a brown Toyota Land Cruiser with a license plate from the southern city of Basra, police said.
Hospitals and police said between 11 and 13 children were killed. Authorities scrambled to compile an accurate count of the dead and injured.
"The explosion was mainly on the children," resident Abbas Ali Jassim said.
Following the attack, charred remains of an engine block wrapped in barbed wire lay in the street. A child's bicycle was crumpled beside the street, which was splattered with pools of blood.
At Kindi hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, one distraught woman swathed in black sat cross-legged outside the operating room.
"May God curse the mujahedeen and their leader," she cried as she pounded her own head in grief.
CROSS-STRAIT COLLABORATION: The new KMT chairwoman expressed interest in meeting the Chinese president from the start, but she’ll have to pay to get in Beijing allegedly agreed to let Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) around the Lunar New Year holiday next year on three conditions, including that the KMT block Taiwan’s arms purchases, a source said yesterday. Cheng has expressed interest in meeting Xi since she won the KMT’s chairmanship election in October. A source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a consensus on a meeting was allegedly reached after two KMT vice chairmen visited China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Director Song Tao (宋濤) in China last month. Beijing allegedly gave the KMT three conditions it had to
STAYING ALERT: China this week deployed its largest maritime show of force to date in the region, prompting concern in Taipei and Tokyo, which Beijing has brushed off Deterring conflict over Taiwan is a priority, the White House said in its National Security Strategy published yesterday, which also called on Japan and South Korea to increase their defense spending to help protect the first island chain. Taiwan is strategically positioned between Northeast and Southeast Asia, and provides direct access to the second island chain, with one-third of global shipping passing through the South China Sea, the report said. Given the implications for the US economy, along with Taiwan’s dominance in semiconductors, “deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority,” it said. However, the strategy also reiterated
‘BALANCE OF POWER’: Hegseth said that the US did not want to ‘strangle’ China, but to ensure that none of Washington’s allies would be vulnerable to military aggression Washington has no intention of changing the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Saturday, adding that one of the US military’s main priorities is to deter China “through strength, not through confrontation.” Speaking at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, Hegseth outlined the US Department of Defense’s priorities under US President Donald Trump. “First, defending the US homeland and our hemisphere. Second, deterring China through strength, not confrontation. Third, increased burden sharing for us, allies and partners. And fourth, supercharging the US defense industrial base,” he said. US-China relations under
FRAUD ISSUES: The app meets none of Taiwan’s 15 cybersecurity standards, and in the past year, about 1,706 fraud cases have been identified on it The Ministry of the Interior yesterday ordered Taiwanese Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu (小紅書, also known as RedNote in English) for a year, after detecting hundreds of instances of fraud on the platform. The ISPs have been instructed to block access to the app to its more than 3 million users in Taiwan, effective immediately, Deputy Minister of the Interior Ma Shih-yuan (馬士元) told a news conference at the National Police Agency’s Fraud Prevention Center. The order is being implemented via protocols governing domain name system (DNS) response policy zones, he said. Xiaohongshu meets none
RSS