Insurgents launched roadside bomb blasts and rocket-propelled grenade attacks north of Baghdad early yesterday, at least nine people, including a policeman's four children.
The children, aged from six to 11 years, and their uncle died in the attack by a team of insurgents shortly after midnight on their home in Balad Ruz, 70km northeast of Baghdad, according to a spokesman from the Iraqi police Joint Coordination Center.
Their father, Abdul-Sattar Hussein, was unhurt in the attack, launched by insurgents firing rocket-propelled grenades at their home and wounding his wife, said the spokesman who declined to be identified further due to fears of reprisal attacks.
Four policemen were killed and nine wounded in a pre-dawn roadside bomb blast that targeted their patrol in Baqubah, 60km northeast of Baghdad, the same center said.
Iraq's violence raged in tandem with continued kidnapping sagas as footage was aired of the abducted son of the secretary of Iraq's defense minister.
No word has also been heard of a female US journalist taken hostage in Baghdad on Jan. 7 and threatened with being killed.
Iraq's electoral commission was set yesterday to start receiving appeals by political parties contesting results from last month's election, with both winners and losers complaining they should have won more seats.
The ensuing weeks are also expected to witness lengthy and complex negotiations to form a national unity government to rule the country for the next four years -- a process that observers say could take at least two months.
A number of political parties, including the conservative Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, which took the lion's share of seats in the Dec. 15 vote, are complaining over calculations used to distribute 45 seats allocated to parties on the basis of their overall performance.
The parliament's other 230 seats were allocated on a constituency basis in the country's 18 provinces with some parties also complaining about the count.
There are fears that the momentum from the elections could be lost during a lengthy negotiation period, especially one marked by increased bloodshed.
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