Sunday 5th June 2005
Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, killing five Iraq soldiers and wounding seven, a police source said yesterday. The attack occurred on Friday at the main gate to the base.
In an important development, US and Iraqi forces arrested an Iraqi national yesterday regarded as a top terror leader in the northern city of Mosul, police said.
The man, known as Mullah Mahdi, was detained with his brother, three other Iraqis and a non-Iraqi Arab national, following a brief clash in eastern Mosul, said Iraqi army Maj Gen Khalil Ahmed Al Obeidi.
Al Obeidi said the terror suspect was affiliated with the Ansar Al Sunna Army, one of Iraq's most feared terror groups, and links to the Syrian intelligence service.
Meanwhile, an Iraqi army unit has been disbanded after it refused to attend a US training course in Baghdad, former members of the unit said yesterday. The soldiers said they feared reprisals from locals if they were seen to have co-operated with the Americans.
At least 108 Iraqis were arrested when hundreds of Iraqi and US troops raided Latifiyah yesterday, an area known as the Triangle of Death, searching for hideouts used by predominantly Sunni Arab militants to mount suicide attacks against nearby Baghdad.
In other violence, a suicide car bomber attacked a police patrol in western Baghdad's Amil neighbourhood yesterday, seriously wounding two policemen. Police in Tikrit said they had also found a body yesterday of a man who had been blindfolded and shot in the head.
In northern Iraqi city of Irbil, Kurdistan's 111-member regional assembly yesterday opened its inaugural session since the national elections.