Wave of deadly bombings hits Iraq

BAGHDAD - At anterior 30 folks were reportedly killed magnetism a series of attacks consequence Iraq Friday, including bombs targeting Shiites attending mosques in the superlative Baghdad.

One car bomb exploded near the main Baghdad place of an anti-U.S. Shiite cleric, officials told The Associated Press.

Hospital further police officials say 14 family were killed in the onset on Muqtada al-Sadr's office compound as worshippers were exit a mosque after Friday prayers. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity whereas they were not authorized to verbalize to the media.

Bombings also elsewhere spell Iraq killed 19 other people in unparalleled of the deadliest days the country has seen in weeks.

The Associated Press authorize the total grim reaper impost across Iraq at 30. There were also reports of more than 100 people being wounded.

The indignation came days after Iraqi authorities announced the killings of the initiation two al-Qaida in Iraq leaders prestige what was seen through a major trouble to the insurgency.




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Polling stations bombed as Iraq election begins

At least 14 people have been killed in Baghdad on the first day of voting in Iraq's parliamentary elections.

Suicide bombers attacked two polling stations in different areas of the city killing at least seven people and wounding many others.


Earlier in the day, a mortar attack on a crowded market killed seven and wounded at least 10 people.
The poll is seen as a security test for Iraq as the US prepares to reduce its military presence in the coming months.


The early voting involves hundreds of thousands of government employees, the sick and prisoners.


The first suicide bomber attacked a polling station in the Mansur district of Baghdad. Three soldiers were killed and 15 wounded.

A little under an hour later another suicide bomber blew himself up in central Baghdad, killing at least four and wounding 10 others.
There were conflicting reports about the first attack of the day in north-western Baghdad.
Agence France-Presse news agency reported that a mortar had been fired at a polling station, but hit a crowded market. Seven people, four of them children, were killed and 23 wounded.

Other reports said the blast was caused by a roadside booby-trap or a rocket fired near a school due to be used as a polling station on Sunday.

On Wednesday, three suicide bombers attacked police and a hospital in Baquba, killing at least 30 people.
Insurgents have threatened to disrupt the elections - regarded as an important test of Iraq's efforts to achieve sovereignty and overcome sectarian divisions.

"Terrorists wanted to hamper the elections, thus they started to blow themselves up in the streets," said Deputy Interior Minister Ayden Khalid Qader said.

The majority of the country goes to the polls on Sunday. More than 6,000 candidates are competing for 325 seats in the election.

The alliance led by current Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has claimed credit for a sharp fall in violence between Shia and Sunni militants.

Mr Maliki is being challenged by a number of groups, including a Shia coalition that includes radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and ex-PM Iyad Allawi's secular cross-sectarian alliance.

Travel around the country has been restricted and the authorities have canceled all leave for security services.
On polling day itself, more than 200,000 security personnel will be on duty in Baghdad.


The US is planning to reduce its military presence by about half in the coming months and withdraw completely from Iraq by 2011.

Iraq suicide bomber targets hospital in triple attack

 A suicide bomber ended a series of deadly attacks in central Iraq by detonating explosives in a hospital emergency ward where victims of two earlier blasts were being treated.


At least 29 people were killed and 42 wounded in the triple bombing attack in Baquba, northeast of the capital Baghdad.

The first car bomb attack targeted a government office near a police checkpoint. Two minutes later, a second suicide car bomb went off near the party headquarters of former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in central part of the city.

About an hour later, as the victims of the first two explosions were being rushed to Baquba general hospital, a third suicide bomber walked into the hospital's emergency room and detonated a bomb.

 The blasts took place just four days before the country is set to hold parliamentary elections -- its second since the ouster of former President Saddam Hussein.

More than 6,000 candidates will compete for 325 seats in the Iraq parliament in the March 7 vote.
U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned of large-scale attacks in the run-up to the voting. And al Qaeda in Iraq's umbrella group, the Islamic State of Iraq, has promised to disrupt the elections.

Iraqi forces have been taking part in drills to improve their response to suicide attacks.

Baquba, the capital of Diyala province, is about 60 km (37 miles) north of Baghdad. Sunni insurgents continue to fight U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces there.

Tony Blair defends UK involvement in Iraq war

Tony Blair has said the Iraq war made the world a safer place and he has "no regrets" about removing Saddam Hussein.

In a robust defence of his decision to back war, Mr Blair said Saddam was a "monster and I believe he threatened not just the region but the world."

The former prime minister was barracked by a member of the public as he made his closing statement at the end of a six hour grilling at the Iraq inquiry.

He said Iraqis were now better off and he would take the same decisions again.

He also rejected claims he manipulated intelligence to justify the invasion and denied making a "covert" deal with George Bush to invade Iraq in April 2002 a year before the war began.

The former prime minister said he had been open about what had been discussed the US president's ranch - which was that Saddam needed to be "dealt with".

"This isn't about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception," he told the panel.

"It's a decision. And the decision I had to take was, given Saddam's history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the over one million people whose deaths he had caused, given 10 years of breaking UN resolutions, could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons programmes or is that a risk that it would be irresponsible to take?"

Sometimes it is important not to ask the "March 2003 question" but the "2010 question", said Mr Blair, arguing that if Saddam had been left in power the UK and its allies would have "lost our nerve" to act.

He said that if Saddam had not been removed "today we would have a situation where Iraq was competing with Iran" both in terms of nuclear capability and "in respect of support of terrorist groups".

He added: "The decision I took - and frankly would take again - was if there was any possibility that he could develop weapons of mass destruction we should stop him."

He said people in Iraq were now "better off" - and hit back at criticism of post war planning, saying it had been disrupted by al-Qaeda and Iran, who had surprised everyone by working together to "destabilise" the country.

"We certainly didn't take a cavalier attitude to planning in the UK. What we planned for was what we thought was going to happen," he said.

Quoting frequently from his own speeches and statements, Mr Blair faced a sometimes tense session, with family members of service personnel killed in Iraq sat behind him in the public gallery reacting with dismay to some of his answers.

Earlier witnesses to the inquiry have suggested he told Mr Bush at their April 2002 meeting at the ranch in Crawford, Texas, that the UK would join the Americans in a war with Iraq.

But Mr Blair said: "What I was saying - I was not saying this privately incidentally, I was saying it in public - was 'we are going to be with you in confronting and dealing with this threat'.

"The one thing I was not doing was dissembling in that position. How we proceed in this is a matter that was open. The position was not a covert position, it was an open position."

Pressed on what he thought Mr Bush took from the meeting, he went further, saying: "I think what he took from that was exactly what he should have taken, which was if it came to military action because there was no way of dealing with this diplomatically, we would be with him."

But he also confirmed that a year later, on the eve of war, the Americans had offered Britain a "way out" of military action, which he had turned down.

Goldsmith decision

"I think President Bush at one point said, before the [Commons] debate, 'Look if it's too difficult for Britain, we understand'.

"I took the view very strongly then - and do now - that it was right for us to be with America, since we believed in this too."

On the issue of whether or not military action would be legal, Mr Blair said Mr Bush decided the UN Security Council's support "wasn't necessary". He said it was "correct" to say that he shared that view, although it would have been "preferable politically".

But he told the inquiry he would not have backed military action if Attorney General Lord Goldsmith had said it "could not be justified legally".

Asked why Lord Goldsmith, after initially saying he thought it would be illegal, in line with all government lawyers at the time, made a statement saying it would be legal a week before the invasion began, Mr Blair said the attorney general "had to come to a conclusion".

He said he had not had any discussions with Lord Goldsmith in the week before he gave his statement but he believed the attorney general had come to his view because weapons inspectors had "indicated that Saddam Hussein had not taken a final opportunity to comply" with UN demands.

Mr Blair was also quizzed about the controversial claim in a September 2002 dossier that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction (WMD) at 45 minutes notice. Mr Blair said it "assumed a vastly greater significance" afterwards than it did at the time.

He said it "would have been better if (newspaper) headlines about the '45-minute claim' had been corrected" in light of the significance it later took on.

'Beyond doubt'

Looking back, he would have made it clearer the claim referred to battlefield munitions, not missiles, and would have preferred to publish the intelligence assessments by themselves as they were "absolutely strong enough".

But Mr Blair insisted that, on the basis of the intelligence available at the time, he stood by his claim at the time that it was "beyond doubt" Iraq was continuing to develop its weapons capability.

However he acknowledged "things obviously look quite different" now given the failure to discover any weapons after the invasion.

Even up to the last minute Mr Blair said he was "desperately" trying to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis but France and Russia "changed their position" and were not going to allow a second UN resolution.

Saddam Hussein had "no intention" of allowing his scientists to co-operate with UN weapons inspectors, he said, with the regime concealing key material.

Giving the inspectors more time would have made little difference, he added. He also said Iraq had the "intent" and technical knowhow to rebuild its weapons programme and would have done so if the international community had not acted.

Mr Blair also denied he would have supported the invasion of Iraq even if he had thought Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, as he appeared to suggest last year in a BBC interview with Fern Brittan.

What he had been trying to say, he explained to the inquiry, was that "you would not describe the nature of the threat in the same way if you knew then what you knew now, that the intelligence on WMD had been shown to be wrong".

He said his position had not changed, despite what reports of the interview had suggested.

Mr Blair was at pains to point out that he believed weapons of mass destruction and regime change could not be treated as separate issues but were "conjoined".

He said "brutal and oppressive" regimes with WMD were a "bigger threat" than a benign states with WMD.

He also stressed the British and American attitude towards the threat posed by Saddam Hussein "changed dramatically" after the terror attacks on 11 September 2001, saying: "I never regarded 11 September as an attack on America, I regarded it as an attack on us."

Inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot began the six hour question session by stressing that Mr Blair was not "on trial" but said he could be recalled to give further evidence if necessary.

'Chemical Ali' executed in Iraq

Ali Hassan al-Majid, a former Iraqi official known as "Chemical Ali", has been executed by hanging, a government spokesman has announced.

Majid, an enforcer in Saddam Hussein's regime and his cousin, had earlier been sentenced to death four times for genocide and crimes against humanity.

Earlier this month, he was sentenced to death for ordering the gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988.

It is believed that about 5,000 people died in the attack.

Iraqi jets swooped over Halabja and for five hours sprayed it with a lethal cocktail of mustard gas and the nerve agents Tabun, Sarin and VX.

Brutality

Majid was "executed by hanging until death," Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement.

"The execution happened without any violations, shouting or cries of joy," he added, in sharp contrast to Saddam's death on the gallows in 2006.

News of the hanging came shortly after three suicide car bombs struck in central Baghdad. It was not immediately clear whether the attacks were linked to his execution.

Majid was first sentenced to hang in June 2007 for his role in a military campaign against ethnic Kurds, codenamed Anfal, that lasted from February to August of 1988.

In December 2008 he also received a death sentence for his role in crushing a Shia revolt after the 1991 Gulf War.

In March 2009 he was sentenced to death, along with others, for the 1999 killings of Shia Muslims in the Sadr City district of Baghdad.

The BBC's Jim Muir in Baghdad says Majid could have been hanged earlier - after his first death sentence for the Anfal campaign.

But it was important to Iraqi Kurds to see him convicted of the Halabja attack, seen as one of the worst atrocities of Saddam Hussein's regime.

No remorse

Our correspondent says there will be great rejoicing or, at the very least, quiet relief among both Iraq's Shia and Kurdish communities, which had suffered greatly at his hands.

Majid - the King of Spades in the US military's pack of cards of most-wanted Iraqis - was arrested in August 2003.

He has refused to express remorse at any of his trials, insisting that he was acting in the interests of Iraqi security.

The Iraqi High Tribunal was set up to try former members of Saddam Hussein's mainly Sunni government and was the same one that sentenced the former president to death.