Middle East

The UN is concerned about the continued flight of Christians from the northern metropolis of Mosul. Sunni radicals are targeting them and several have been assassinated. Iraqi refugees who try to return to their old homes are often still facing violence on their return, McClatchy reports. The UN High Commission on Refugees staff in Amman […]

Turkish war planes again bombed positions in northern Iraq where guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) were thought to be holedup. Iraqi authorities ordered 1,000 police into the districts of Mosul where Christians tend to live to stanch the flow of emigrants sparked by a series of assassinations of Christians. About 3,000 Christians are […]

Is this part of a Bush attempt at an October surprise? Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that its sources in Baghdad say that the al-Maliki government will sign off on a security agreement with the Bush administration “within days.” The report says that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has assured the government that he will accept the […]

Turkish war planes hit 21 targets inside Iraq, in the Kurdish north, on Friday night. Meanwhile, bombings and attacks killed 24 and wounded 45 in the mixed district of Dora.

A female suicide bomber detonated her belt bomb on Wednesday near some Iraqi army humvees in front of a courthouse in Baquba, killing at least 11 persons and wounding 20. Five Iraqi soldiers were killed, including 2 Majors. Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province, is 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. It is riven by conflicts […]

A US raid on a suspected guerrilla safe house left 11 members of a family dead on Sunday, including three women and three children. The US military insists that the dead men were members of “al-Qaeda” and that the house was full of arms, and that, indeed, some of the destruction was caused by a […]

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic on the aftermath of the horrific bombings on Thursday at Shiite mosques in Baghdad that left 26 persons dead and dozens wounded. Wa’il Abd al-Latif, an independent member of parliament saw a relationship between the bombings and the sources of the recent political tension that have not been resolved. One of […]

In an interview with the Associated Press, PM Nuri al-Maliki warned that the future is dark if Iraq and the US do not agree on a security pact. And without a pact, he said, all the security progress made in the last year would be at risk. He points out that the alternative is to […]

A wave of deadly bombings and other attacks swept Baghdad on Sunday, killing nearly three dozen persons and wounding over 100. The attacks on Shiite neighborhoods were likely intended to remind the Iraqi public on the eve of Eid al-Fitr (the celebration of the end of the fasting month of Ramadan) that the Sunni guerrilla […]