A suicide bomber blew himself up Sunday in the midst of a celebration to welcome home an Iraqi detainee released from US custody, killing at least 30 people, Iraqi officials said.
The US military, meanwhile, announced the arrest of an al-Qaeda in Iraq figure who allegedly planned the 2006 kidnapping of American journalist Jill Carroll — one of the highest-profile attacks against Westerners in Iraq.
The suicide attack occurred inside one of several tents set up outside a house in the Abu Ghraib area on Baghdad’s western outskirts, according to residents and police. It was unclear if the former detainee was among the casualties.
A woman who was wounded but declined to give her name for security reasons said she was preparing food behind the tents when the blast occurred at about 9pm, knocking her and her three young children off their feet.
Residents and police said Ayyid Salim al-Zubaie, a local sheik in the mainly Sunni area, had invited dozens of guests to a banquet in honor of his son, who was released earlier in the day from Camp Bucca in southern Iraq.
Residents said the son had quarreled with al-Qaeda members while in detention and may have been the target of the attack.
The guests also included several members of the local awakening council, a US-allied group that has turned against al-Qaeda.
Yassir al-Jumaili, a doctor at the hospital in nearby Fallujah where most of the wounded were taken, gave the death toll as 25 and said at least 29 other people were wounded.
The blast was a grim reminder of the dangers still facing Iraqis despite a sharp decrease in violence after last year’s US troop buildup, a Sunni decision to join forces with the Americans against al-Qaeda and a Shiite militia ceasefire.
The announcement of the arrest of Salim Abdullah Ashur al-Shujayri was a major breakthrough in a series of kidnappings.
He was captured Aug. 11 in Baghdad and accused of being “the planner behind the kidnapping” of Carroll, a Christian Science Monitor reporter who was seized Jan. 7, 2006, and released three months later, the military said.
The statement also said that al-Shujayri’s associates were involved in the kidnappings of Christian peace activists and British aid worker Margaret Hassan, but did not elaborate.
Kidnappings of Westerners forced foreigners to flee Iraq or take refuge in heavily guarded compounds, diminishing the ability of aid groups and journalists to operate.
Many of the victims deaths were recorded on videotapes distributed to Arab satellite TV stations or posted on the Web.
Hassan, 59, the director of CARE international in Iraq, was abducted in Baghdad in October 2004 and shown on a video pleading for her life, calling on then British prime minister Tony Blair to withdraw troops from Iraq.
She was killed a month later, but her body was never found. The case drew special attention because Hassan, who was married to an Iraqi, had lived in the country for 30 years and spent nearly half her life helping Iraqis.
Four men from the Chicago-based group, Christian Peacemaker Teams, disappeared Nov. 26, 2005, in Baghdad and videotapes later showed them in captivity. One of the hostages, American Tom Fox, 54, of Clear Brook, Virginia, was found shot dead. The other three — two Canadians and a Briton — were later rescued.
Carroll was seized in west Baghdad and her interpreter was killed. The kidnappers, a formerly unknown group calling itself the Revenge Brigade, demanded the release of all women detainees in Iraq. US officials freed some female detainees but said the decision was unrelated to the demands.
The statement said US troops also captured another al-Qaeda figure — Ali Rash Nasir Jiyad al-Shammari — on Aug. 17 in Baghdad.
He was accused of being a senior adviser for the terror network and funneling money, weapons and explosives to insurgents in the capital “during its most active operational period in early 2007,” the military said.
Al-Shammari, also known as Abu Tiba, personally approved targets for car and suicide bombings targeting Iraqi civilians, the military said.
The military statement said al-Qaeda in Iraq conducted almost 300 bombings, killing more than 1,500 civilians and wounding more than twice that many in last year, compared with 28 attacks that killed 125 Iraqi civilians in the first half of this year.
“The capture of Abu Tiba and Abu Othman eliminates two of the few remaining experienced leaders in the AQI network,” US military spokesman Rear Admiral Patrick Driscoll said.
Also on Sunday, the US military said a 13-year-old girl wearing a bomb-laden vest surrendered to Iraqi police in Baqubah rather than blow herself up. She led police to a second suicide vest and was detained, the military said.
Women have increasingly been recruited by insurgents to carry out attacks because it’s easier for them to evade security checks.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS