Shiite militiamen kill dozens of Iraqi Sunnis in mosque shooting
Iraqi Shiite militiamen machine-gunned minority Sunni Muslims in a village mosque on Friday, killing dozens just as Baghdad is trying to build a cross-community government to fight Sunni militants whose rise has alarmed Western powers. A morgue official in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, said ...
Defiant al-Maliki deploys special forces to key areas of Baghdad: police
Special forces loyal to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki were deployed in strategic areas of Baghdad on Sunday night after he delivered a tough speech indicating he would not cave in to pressure to drop a bid for a third term, police sources said. Shiite ...
Islamic State killed 500 Yazidis and buried some victims alive, Iraq minister says
Islamic State militants have killed at least 500 members of Iraq's Yazidi ethnic minority during their offensive in the north, Iraq's human rights minister told Reuters on Sunday. Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said the Sunni militants had also buried alive some of their victims, including women ...
Iraq's Sunni Islamist insurgency has further crippled the nation's dream to match the oil power of Saudi Arabia, making oil fields in the safer south even more vital — but even that region has not been completely free from attacks. Baghdad is struggling to contain ...
Obama faces doubts latest foray in Iraq can turn tide against rebels
Even as warplanes dropped the first U.S. bombs on Islamic militant targets in northern Iraq, President Barack Obama faced doubts inside his administration and out that the limited mission he circumscribed is enough to shift the balance in a conflict threatening to tear Iraq ...
The Iraqi government provided a planeload of ammunition to fighters from Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish region on Friday, a U.S. official said, in an "unprecedented" act of military cooperation between Kurdish and Iraqi forces brought on by an urgent militant threat. The official said Iraqi security ...
After defeating Kurds, Islamic State rebels seize Iraqi towns, oil field
Islamic State insurgents have captured two northern Iraqi towns and an oil field in their first major victory over Kurdish fighters, witnesses said Sunday. The al-Qaida offshoot, which swept through northern Iraq in June almost unopposed by Iraq's U.S.-trained army, poses the biggest challenge to ...
After Iraqi army crumbles, Maliki turns to state TV for help
State television is working overtime to persuade Iraqis to help Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki confront an al-Qaida offshoot that has seized wide tracts of the country, but its unifying call has been blunted by his sectarian reputation. Since the humiliating loss of much of Iraq's ...
Salman Khaled has already lived through Baghdad's sectarian disintegration; with Iraq now splintering into Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish regions, he says this time the survival of the country is at stake. "Things are really tense and it could get worse," said the 23-year-old Sunni ...
The declaration of a so-called caliphate by Islamist militants in Iraq lacks legitimacy and their death threats to Christians are a danger to civilization, Turkey's top cleric, the successor to the last caliph's most senior imam, said. The Islamic State last month declared its leader, ...
Using its own version of soft and hard power, the Islamic State is crushing resistance across northern Iraq so successfully that its promise to march on Baghdad may no longer be unrealistic bravado. While conventional states try to win hearts and minds abroad before necessarily ...
