BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A suicide car bombing in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul killed four American soldiers and an interpreter Monday, the U.S. military said.
The military said three soldiers were killed when the bomb exploded near their vehicle. Another soldier died later of wounds.
An interpreter injured in the strike died later as well.
Violence has been dropping in Iraq, but the Mosul area remains one of the more volatile regions because of ethnic tensions and the presence of the al Qaeda in Iraq militant group.
Twenty-two American military personnel have been killed in the war this year, 14 of them in nonhostile circumstances.
The number of troops to die in the nearly 6-year-old war stands at 4,242.
Aswat al-Iraq: A U.S. patrol on Sunday shot down a gunman who threw a hand grenade at it in downtown Mosul, according to a security source. "The national police delivered to the morgue in Mosul the body of a gunman, who was killed by U.S. forces in al-Farouq area, downtown Mosul," the source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/09/2009 00:00 ||
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BAGHDAD - Three consecutive explosions rocked Baghdad on Sunday, leaving at least one person dead and at least 20 people wounded, local media reported.
Early Sunday morning, police sources told the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency, a bomb blast injured two civilians on a main thoroughfare in Baghdads al-Karada district. Later in the day, a second explosion killed an Iraqi man and wounded at least 14 other civilians in the western Baghdad district of al-Qahira, the news agency reported. Soon after, a car bomb exploded in the Mansour district of western Baghdad, injuring at least four people.
In an apparently unrelated incident in northern Iraq, unknown gunmen on Sunday killed an Iraqi policemen and captured another, along with his father, VOI reported. The gunmen seized the two from the Sinjar district of Iraqs ethnically divided Nineveh province, not far from the border with Syria, and 120 km west of Mosul, the provincial capital, and 400 kilometres north of Baghdad. The area, while predominantly Sunni, is among the most ethnically diverse in Iraq.
Posted by: Steve White ||
02/09/2009 00:00 ||
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BAGHDAD - Iraqs parliament remained deadlocked on the election of a new speaker on Sunday, just two days after US Vice President Joe Biden said Iraq needed to push ahead with political reform. The failure is a blow to the fledgling democracy which without a speaker cannot debate or approve a new budget and oil laws deemed crucial to the reconstruction of the country.
There are five candidates vying for the post, but rival Sunni politicians cannot agree on who should get the job. A group of parties left the hall today and there were not enough MPs to choose a new speaker, said Jamal al-Butikh, chief of the National Iraqi List, the parliamentary group headed by former prime minister Iyad Allawi.
Outspoken Mahmud Mashhadani quit as speaker on December 23, triggering political wrangling over a replacement. He resigned after Kurdish and Shiite MPs clamoured for him to go because he had described some lawmakers as sons of dogs in fierce debates about the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at former US president George W. Bush.
Butikh said MPs would reconvene on Monday to try and break the impasse.
Under Iraqs complex political rules, Sunni Arabs have the right to nominate the speaker but bitter infighting in the largest Sunnni Arab bloc, the National Concord Front, has seen them unable to agree on the best candidate.
Posted by: Steve White ||
02/09/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
This IS how free politics works. Messy. But I think they'll come up with something. Something nobody likes, but that just enough can tolerate for it to be approved.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.