Iraqi authorities pressed yesterday with Operation Lightning in Baghdad after presenting an initial tally of the dragnet's success, following a surge of violence in the north of the country.
Iraqi authorities arrested 20 "terrorists" in Baghdad yesterday as part of an ongoing military operation, a spokesman for the interior ministry said.
The arrests brought to 720 the number of suspected insurgents detained since Operation Lighting was launched last Sunday, the spokesman, Colonel Adnan Abdul-Rahman said.
The national television channel al-Iraqiya reported that another 136 arrests occurred in Hillah, south of Baghdad.
Quanties of weapons were also seized.
At least 28 people have been killed in the five-day operation.
However, 10 Iraqis were killed in an overnight suicide bombing in a remote village north of Baghdad, officials said yesterday, taking the number of people killed during a bloody day of violence in the north to almost 50.
Thursday's carnage claimed the lives of at least 49 people, including more than 30 in four suicide bombings across the north and a Shiite cleric in the southern city of Basra.
Police and relatives said yesterday that Ali Abdul-Hussein, the imam of a Shiite mosque in Basra, was shot outside his house on Thursday night by two gunmen who then escaped in a car.
At least 825 people, including U.S. forces, have been killed since the new Shiite-led government was announced April 28.
Dozens of Shiite and Sunni clerics have been assassinated in recent months, and some religious groups say the killings are an attempt to provoke sectarian civil war in Iraq.
Baghdad residents reported some additional mobile checkpoints by interior ministry commandos and combined patrols of Iraqi and US special forces have searched suspected insurgent areas while Apache attack helicopters flew sorties over several parts of the city.
But while the aircraft occasionally dropped flares to protect against ground attacks, there was little evidence of major US participation in the offensive, and in many areas of the city, life carried on as usual.
Up to 40,000 army troops and police personnel were to take part in the sweep, but Baghdad streets were filled more often with a motley collection of dusty foreign-built cars than with armored Humvees or heavily-armed personnel carriers.
"There is no limit to its duration. It will track terrorists, and eliminate their hideouts and car bomb workshops to halt the attacks and murders," an interior ministry official said.
Arrests were reported elsewhere in the country as well.
In the southern city of Nasiriyah, police reportedly arrested Anwar Abdel Karim al-Saadun, the brother of a former regional Baath party chief along with three other suspects.
His brother, Abdel Baqi Abdel Karim, is on the US list of 55 most-wanted former regime figures and is still on the run.
Police also captured two former Baath party members accused of killing 43 Shiites during the 1991 revolt against former president Saddam Hussein, the police chief in the southern city of Karbala said.
In a another development, two Iraqi civilians were killed when their vehicle was in collision with a US armored personnel carrier near Khalis in Diyala Province, bordering Baghdad, the US military said yesterday.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS