Two female suicide bombers have attacked Baghdad's main Shia shrine, killing at least 60 people and injuring 125 others, officials in Iraq say.
The attack happened at the Imam Moussa al-Kadhim shrine in the Kadhimiya area as people gathered for Friday prayers.
It comes a day after 84 people were killed in two separate suicide attacks in Baghdad and Baquba.
Many victims in Baquba and in Baghdad on Friday were Iranian pilgrims and the violence was condemned in Tehran.
President Barack Obama holds my admiration
with high hopes for his message of change in Washington, D.C. It is
puzzling, however, that he has adopted most of the previous
administration's formula for dragging out the withdrawal of our
troops from the mistaken war in Iraq for nearly three more years.
Very little "change" here.
BAGHDAD - Amir Jabbar doesn't know how many of his friends have been murdered since the Iraq war started six years ago. He stopped counting sometime back in 2007. The numbers just got too high, he said.
"Maybe 10. Maybe more," the 31-year-old parking lot attendant said, shrugging. "It's too many."
Most of them were blown up in bomb attacks, he explained. A few just disappeared. They've been gone so long that he figures they aren't coming back.
Air strikes and artillery barrages have taken a heavy toll among the most vulnerable of the Iraqi people, with children and women forming a disproportionate number of the dead.
Analysis carried out for the research group Iraq Body Count (IBC) found that 39 per cent of those killed in air raids by the US-led coalition were children and 46 per cent were women. Fatalities caused by mortars, used by American and Iraqi government forces as well as insurgents, were 42 per cent children and 44 per cent women.
LONDON -
Every once in a while a project so successfully portrays the
universality of human emotion that it is both admirable and timeless.
"Open Shutters Iraq" is one such project.
"Open
Shutters" began as a series of photographic essays and has since become
a documentary film of the same name. Both have grown from a photography
workshop for Iraqi women initiated by British photojournalist Eugenie
Dolberg, in Damascus in 2006, during one of the most violent periods of
the recent Iraqi conflict.
BAGHDAD - Thousands of supporters of the anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Thursday protested the occupation of Iraq, six years after the toppling of a Saddam Hussein statue symbolised the fall of his regime.
Crowds lined the streets leading to Firdos Square in Baghdad, where Saddam's giant bronze sculpture was wrestled to the ground with the help of US Marines in 2003, an iconic image that signalled the end of his dictatorial rule.
Sandstorms are unpredictable, but in the case of Barack Obama's rushed trip to Iraq
the one that hit Baghdad just as he was landing on Tuesday afternoon
was highly unfortunate. US officials were forced to cancel the
president's helicopter flight to the Green Zone to meet Iraqi leaders.
BAGHDAD - Mine-filled Iraq plans to accelerate the clearance of anti-personnel mines that threaten to kill up to five percent of the country's population, officials announced on Monday.
"Iraq has one of the world's largest contamination problems of landmines, unexploded ordnance and other explosive remnants of war," Iraq's environment minister Narmin Othman said in a statement.
"Clearing these mines is essential and urgent. We intend to increase coordination within the government on this is important issue," she said.
BAGHDAD - Late last month Blackwater Worldwide lost its billion-dollar contract to protect American diplomats here, but by next month many if not most of its private security guards will be back on the job in Iraq.
