An armed group claimed in a video yesterday to have obtained a large amount of explosives missing from a munitions depot facility in Iraq and threatened to use them against foreign troops.
A group calling itself Al-Islam's Army Brigades, Al-Karar Brigade, said it had coordinated with officers and soldiers of "the American intelligence" to obtain a "huge amount of the explosives that were in the al-Qaqaa facility."
PHOTO: AP
The claim couldn't be independently verified. The speaker was surrounded by masked, armed men standing in front of a black banner with the group's name on it.
"We promise God and the Iraqi people that we will use it against the occupation forces and those who cooperate with them in the event of these forces threatening any Iraqi city," the man added.
Nearly 350 tonnes of conventional explosives have disappeared from the al-Qaqaa facility south of Baghdad, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Meanwhile, a car bomb exploded yesterday in southern Baghdad, killing one US soldier and at least one Iraqi civilian, the US military said.
The attack against a 1st Cavalry Division patrol occurred at about 7:30am in the Rashid district of the capital, the military said. Two other soldiers received minor injuries.
At least one and possibly two Iraqi civilians were also killed in the blast, a statement said.
Elsewhere, gunmen killed an Iraqi news reader on her way home from work at al-Sharqiya television in Baghdad, her employers said yesterday.
Liqaa Abdul-Razzaq, a popular presenter who had worked for Iraqi state television before last year's war, was shot dead on Wednesday evening.
US aircraft also bombed a suspected rebel safehouse yesterday in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, killing two, the US military and witnesses said.
The overnight strike in the northern part of the city targeted a "meeting site" used by suspected allies of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the US military said in a statement. Al-Zarqawi and his terror group are believed to be operating from Fallujah.
Residents said two brothers died in the airstrike and a third sibling suffered injuries. The victim's family denied the men were insurgents and relatives buried the dead men hours after the strike.
"My brothers were no fighters ... I was preparing to marry them off after the Fallujah crisis ends, now I am burying them with my own hands instead," family member Mahmoud Nasser said.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS