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Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, on Saturday said that the Iraqi security forces captured a leading figure in Saddam Hussein’s Baath party in an operation based on intelligence reports. Al-Abadi said this in his address to a ceremony in Baghdad for the 146th anniversary of the Iraqi press. “The security forces managed to arrest the terrorist Abdul Karim al-Sadoun by the efforts of the Iraqi intelligence,” Abadi said. Abadi did not give further details about how or where the arrest took place, saying he preferred an official statement to declare the details later as interrogation was still underway. Al-Sadoun was...

A fresh wave of bombs has killed at least 21 people across Iraq - mostly targeting Shia areas - officials say. The deadliest was in the city of Hilla, south of the capital Baghdad, where two car bombs at a market killed at least nine civilians. Other bombs hit Baghdad itself as well as Basra, Nasiriya and Karbala in the south of the country. Sectarian violence has surged across Iraq in recent months, reaching its highest level since 2008. More than 5,000 people have been killed so far this year in Iraq, 800 of them in August alone, according to...

Rome, 20 Jan. (AKI) - Italian and Iraqi officials will on Sunday inaugurate a new business centre in the southern Iraqi city of Nasirya where Italy's military contingent in Iraq is currently deployed. The Bab Tahir International District includes an "industrial hotel' which aims to provide a venue where Italian and Iraqi business people can display their products and discuss investment and trade opportunities. Sunday's inauguration will be held under the auspices of the Italian Foreign Ministry which has organised the visit by a delegation of industrialists from Italy to coincide with the centre's opening. The event will also mark...

Saddam, the ATM of Al Qaeda By Christopher S. Carson FrontPageMagazine.com | November 15, 2004 The Report of the 9/11 Commission has been digested, and the news media outlets have seized upon it as confirmation of their view that al Qaeda is a kind of purely stateless entity that never had "operational links" with rogue states like Iraq. Somehow, goes the thrust of the Report, Osama bin Laden was for years able to finance, train and supply an international terrorist corporation that had ongoing jihad operations in fifty countries - by himself, on no more than a $30 million personal...

HER dusty file was one of hundreds of thousands of documents stacked in a house in a wealthy neighbourhood of Baghdad. Asma Rasheed married a pilot, lived comfortably in the presidential compound of Saddam Hussein and directed a microbiology programme that was not supposed to exist. Rasheed’s light blue folder has emerged from a huge archive seized by forces loyal to Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, which opposed Saddam. The archive — a dark who’s who of Iraq — reveals the tiniest details of blandishments and humiliations by a paranoid regime that shared the Nazis’ obsession...

NASSIRIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - Radical Shi'ite militiamen fought gun battles with Italian troops in the southern town of Nassiriya on Tuesday and two civilians were killed, witnesses said. The violence was part of a surge of unrest led by Moqtada al-Sadr, a cleric fiercely opposed to the U.S.-led occupation. The fighting in Nassiriya erupted at about 4 a.m. (0000 GMT) and continued into the morning. Four Italian vehicles had been burned in the clashes in the Zeitoun district, witnesses said. Pro-Sadr fighters were still controlling the area, near the local headquarters of Iraq (news - web sites)'s Coalition Provisional...

NEW YORK - Graphic video footage of a badly injured Jessica Lynch and Lori Piestewa, who may have died shortly afterward, was taken by Iraqi state television following the ambush of the soldiers' Army convoy, NBC reported Tuesday night. The video, aired on "NBC Nightly News," shows the two Army privates at the hospital where they were taken following the March 23 ambush of the 507th Maintenance Co. The tape was never aired in Iraq, NBC reported. Piestewa, her face swollen and bruised and her head loosely bandaged, is shown as someone positions her feet, and then her head, for...

<p>JACKSONVILLE, North Carolina (CNN) -- It was the deadliest day of the Iraq war.</p> <p>Eighteen Marines were killed in Nasiriya on March 23 as U.S. and coalition forces drove to Baghdad.</p> <p>Six months later, those who fought alongside them told CNN they remain bitter that an undetermined number of their friends were killed -- not by Iraqis -- but by an Air Force A-10 they hoped was coming to their rescue.</p>

by 2nd Lt. Gerardo Gonzalez 64th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs 5/2/2003 - OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM (AFPN)  -- After more than 220 sorties, almost 2,000 combat flying hours and more than 6,000 jammed enemy signals in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the airmen of the 41st Expeditionary Electronic Combat Squadron can call it a day. As part of the 64th Air Expeditionary Wing deployed to Southwest Asia, the 41st EECS played a key role during the war by disrupting Iraqi military communications to support many operations, including the rescue of Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch. The 41st flies the EC-130H Compass Call aircraft, and...

UWAIT, April 26 — For America's Special Operations forces, the war in Iraq almost started with a disaster. On March 18, three MH-53 Pave Low helicopters swept low and fast through the night toward a landing zone in the southern Iraqi desert. In their bellies were Toyota pickup trucks carrying Army Special Forces soldiers: the unconventional vanguard of an invasion that was to begin in two days.But in the swirling dust, one of the helicopters clipped a rock outcropping as it tried to land. The aircraft whirled about like a bucking bronco before crashing on its side in a...

Nothing on their website yet. This is on the bottom of the screen.

March 30, 2003US Marines turn fire on civilians at the bridge of deathMark Franchetti, NasiriyaTHE light was a strange yellowy grey and the wind was coming up, the beginnings of a sandstorm. The silence felt almost eerie after a night of shooting so intense it hurt the eardrums and shattered the nerves. My footsteps felt heavy on the hot, dusty asphalt as I walked slowly towards the bridge at Nasiriya. A horrific scene lay ahead. Some 15 vehicles, including a minivan and a couple of trucks, blocked the road. They were riddled with bullet holes. Some had caught fire and...

<p>NASIRIYA, Iraq (CNN) -- U.S. Marines appear to have secured the southern bank of the Euphrates River and are taking heavy fire from the other side Sunday in a town that has become the scene of a drawn-out battle.</p> <p>For almost a week, the former tourist town of Nasiriya has seen intense fighting. (Map of Iraq) Last Sunday, a group of U.S. Army soldiers took a wrong turn and were ambushed by Iraqi forces, who killed 10 and captured at least five others.</p>

WITH V CORPS HEADQUARTERS NEAR THE KUWAIT BORDER, March 29 — The bodies of four American servicemen have been found by the Marines in a shallow grave in the battle-worn city of Nasiriya, near the Euphrates River. Military officials said they believed that the four were executed by Iraqi paramilitary forces after they were seized in an ambush last Sunday. Military officials declined to speculate about whether the four bodies were those of captured American soldiers who were shown alive by Al Jazeera network last weekend. The military had heard reports that the soldiers were executed after appearing on the...

<p>NEAR NASIRIYA, Iraq (CNN) -- U.S. Marines Friday recovered the bodies of seven fallen comrades who died in intense fighting around Nasiriya in southern Iraqi Sunday, officials said.</p> <p>The city has been the scene of the fiercest fighting the Marine Corps has been involved in since Vietnam, senior Marines told CNN, and still is not under coalition control five days after coalition forces first engaged Iraqi paramilitaries.</p>

US Marines say they have captured an Iraqi army general in Nasiriya, in southern Iraq. Sporadic fighting continues in and around the town, although not as severe as in recent days. US aircraft and artillery are continuing to attack targets in Nasiriya. The man the US says is a general was captured on Thursday as US Marines stepped up their offensive against Iraqi units. According to Marine officers with Task Force Tarawa, he was found at his home. Documents and a large safe have been taken away for examination. More than 300 Iraqis have been taken prisoner since the fighting...

0617: US marines report they have captured an Iraqi general in Nasiriya on Thursday, BBC correspondent Andrew North says. Also . . . 0607: Thousands more US troops are moving in to join the battle for the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriya, backed by heavy artillery.

reports on fox are that marines were executed by iraqis while trying to surrender - all for now

Fighting Continues in Nasiriya, Nicknamed 'Ambush Alley'Marines of Task Force Tarawa fighting today in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriya. By MICHAEL WILSON MASIRIYA, Iraq, March 24 — Fighting continued today in and around what the marines have nicknamed "Ambush Alley," with Iraqi guerrillas jumping out of buses, pickups and taxis to join the battle. Heavy small-arms fire kept up as sundown approached on the second day of fighting in the city, key to American advances north because of its two bridges across the Euphrates. A second tank unit made it into Nasiriya, along with ammunition, food, fuel and water...

U.S. Marines are engaged in heavy house-to-house fighting in a southern Iraqi city and have called in at least eight medical evacuation choppers. The news came as Iraqi forces apparently searched in Baghdad for what they said was a downed coalition pilot. ABCNEWS' John Berman said a battalion of some 1,000 Marines was engaged in an intense firefight in the southern city of Nasiriya, and helicopters had been called in to evacuate wounded allied soldiers from the battle zone. Berman, embedded with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said the exact number of people evacuated was not immediately available. Nasiriya is...