A female suicide bomber killed the head of a local security group northeast of Baghdad yesterday, the targeted leader's brother and provincial police said. A child and a security guard were also killed.
The woman, wearing an explosives belt, entered the house of Sheik Thaeir Ghadhban al-Karkhi in the predominantly Sunni town of Kanaan, 20km east of Baqubah in Diyala Province, and blew herself up, said Duraid Mahmoud, the sheik's brother.
A provincial police official, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to release the information, confirmed the attack.
PHOTO: AFP
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but al-Qaeda in Iraq has been targeting fellow Sunni Arabs who have taken up arms against the militants and joined the so-called awakening councils like the one al-Karkhi led.
The councils are made up of US-backed former insurgents who have risen up against al-Qaeda's brutality and the strict Islamic codes of conduct it was trying to impose on local populations.
Mahmoud, the sheik's brother, said the bomber had visited the sheik's house on Sunday, claiming that her husband had been kidnapped and asking for help.
Mahmoud said his brother told the woman to return yesterday.
"She came back this morning and nobody checked her. She had an appointment with the sheik and the guards told her to go and knock on his door," Mahmoud said.
The woman was ushered into the house and blew herself up once she got close to the sheik, Mahmoud said.
Meanwhile, anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr will remain in overall charge of his Shiite radical movement even as he steps back from its day-to-day operations to pursue his religious studies, aides said yesterday.
Sadr has no intention of quitting Iraqi politics despite the widespread perception that he was withdrawing after he admitted on Friday that there were splits within his movement, the aides said.
Sadr has "not ceased his contact with us and he remains in control of strategic decisions," said Liwa Sumaysim, the head of the movement's political bureau.
On Friday, the cleric admitted that some of the movement's leaders had broken away after he ordered a six-month extension to a freeze on the activities of its Mehdi Army militia which he first announced last year.
"Many of my close companions have departed for worldly reasons, some of them want to be independent," Sadr said.
"The fact that a number of people did not return to their hawza [religious school] and the fact that many are meddling in political lives while we thought they were loyal has made me isolate myself," he said.
Sadr's spokesman in Najaf, Sheikh Salah al-Obeidi, said the cleric's statement should not be seen as a decision to quit politics.
"The letter does not mean that Sadr wants to isolate himself from the political sphere," Obeidi said.
He has "found a new way to deal with day-to-day issues, focusing on the essentials, which is knowledge and religion, and following the events from a distance," Obeidi said.
Also see: Passing on the cost of conflict to future generations
Apps and Web sites that use artificial intelligence (AI) to undress women in photos are soaring in popularity, researchers said. In September alone, 24 million people visited undressing Web sites, the social network analysis company Graphika said. Many of these undressing, or “nudify,” services use popular social networks for marketing, Graphika said. For instance, since the beginning of this year, the number of links advertising undressing apps increased more than 2,400 percent on social media, including on X and Reddit, the researchers said. The services use AI to recreate an image so that the person is nude. Many of the services only
IN ABSOLUTE CONTROL: About 80 percent of Russians approve of Putin, a survey shows, but that might be misleading due to his intolerance to criticism Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday moved to prolong his repressive and unyielding grip on Russia for at least another six years, announcing his candidacy in the presidential election in March that he is all but certain to win. Putin still commands wide support after nearly a quarter-century in power, despite starting an immensely costly war in Ukraine that has taken thousands of his people’s lives, provoked repeated attacks inside Russia — including one on the Kremlin itself — and corroded its aura of invincibility. A short-lived rebellion in June by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin raised widespread speculation that Putin could be
JUMPING BAIL: The democracy advocate said made the decision after ‘considering the situation in Hong Kong, my personal safety, my physical and mental health’ Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow (周庭), who was jailed over her role in massive 2019 protests, on Sunday said she had moved to Canada and would not return to meet her bail conditions. Chow was one of the best-known young faces of the 2012, 2014 and 2019 protest movements against Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian rule in Hong Kong. She spent about seven months behind bars for her role in a protest outside Hong Kong police headquarters in 2019, when huge crowds rallied week after week in the most serious challenge to China’s rule since Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. On Sunday
TAKING STOCK: It was not yet clear how damaging the espionage, dating to 1981, has been, as authorities are still assessing the situation, the State Department said A former US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested and charged with spying for Cuba over a 40-year span, the US Department of Justice announced on Monday, detailing a shock betrayal by a suspect who called the US “the enemy.” US Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out the allegations against Victor Manuel Rocha, a onetime member of the White House’s National Security Council now accused of using his positions within the government to support Cuba’s “clandestine intelligence-gathering mission” against the US. The charges against Rocha, 73, expose “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign
RSS