Negative Blogs

A suicide car bomber blew himself up as a NATO convoy passed his vehicle on the outskirts of the capital on Friday, killing one civilian and wounding two troops, officials said.

NATO said one Afghan civilian was killed in the blast near the entrance to a coalition base south of Kabul. The Afghan Defense Ministry said an Afghan soldier and a NATO service member were wounded in the explosion.

The Hizb-i-Islami group that operates under the leadership of warlord and former Afghan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar claimed responsibility for the attack.

“The bombing has been carried out by one of our men,” Harun Zarghun, a spokesman for Hizb-i-Islami, told The Associated Press. “The attack is part of our campaign to oust American forces from Afghanistan.”

The attack slightly damaged a Humvee but destroyed the vehicle driven used by the suicide bomber, AP Television News footage showed.

Although suicide bomb attacks are becoming commonplace in southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan, where NATO is fighting the Taliban, increased security has made them less frequent in the capital.

In eastern Afghanistan, a NATO service member was killed in an insurgent attack, the coalition said. Neither the nationality of the service member nor any other details were released. So far this year, 626 U.S. and international troops have died in Afghanistan, according to a count by The Associated Press.

Also on Friday, the coalition killed at least seven insurgents in an airstrike on a Taliban command center in the Naw Zad district of Helmand province in the south. Afghan and NATO troops continue to battle a resilient insurgency in Helmand while Afghan officials work to improve governance and rush development into the region.

Intelligence information and tips from local citizens led the coalition to the location, which insurgents use as a meeting site. In the past few days, numerous armed insurgents had been seen coming and going from the location, the coalition said.

NATO said that on Thursday at least 15 militants were killed by in a fierce round of fighting in Helmand province and 15 more were detained during three overnight operations targeting Taliban leaders across Afghanistan.

The heavy fighting erupted in Sangin district after a member of a joint Afghan and coalition patrol was struck by a homemade bomb, the coalition said. Insurgents continued to attack as a coalition helicopter evacuated casualties. The coalition force called in air support and the insurgents were killed by missiles, a 30mm cannon and artillery fire.

Also in Helmand, a joint force captured several suspected insurgents in Musa Qala district Thursday while going after a senior Taliban leader known for trafficking in weapons and explosives.

In neighboring Kandahar province, Afghan and coalition forces detained other suspected insurgents in Panjawi district while pursuing a member of the Taliban suspected of transporting bomb parts and other weapons between Pakistan and Kandahar, the largest city in the south.

In the third operation, which was conducted in Khost province in the east, security forces also detained insurgents while looking for a member of the al-Qaida-linked Haqqani network who supplies weapons, vehicles and materials to militant fighters in the area.

In total, 15 suspects were apprehended in the overnight operations, NATO said.

The coalition also reported that two Taliban bomb makers were captured Thursday in an area of Kandahar province near the Pakistan border where NATO has been trying to disrupt insurgent supply routes. Through intelligence tips, the coalition tracked the two to a compound in Spin Boldak where they were apprehended. Numerous bomb components, including detonation switches, were confiscated at the site.

Associated Press writer Asif Shahzad contributed to this report from Islamabad, Pakistan.

By kansascity.com

The destroyed remains of a vehicle used by a suicide bomber is seen as a U.S. military vehicle is being towed away after being hit by a suicide car bomber on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, Friday, Nov. 12, 2010.

Security experts say that parcel bombings sent to embassies across Athens on Monday and Tuesday have all the hallmarks of anarchist groups looking to make a ’symbolic gesture.’

Athens, Greece

A two-day barrage of parcel bombings targeting embassies in Athens bears the hallmarks of anarchist groups in Greece that may have used the attacks to draw international support for their revolutionary cause.

Police have declined to say officially whom they suspect in the attacks, other than it is likely a local anarchist group unconnected to mail bombs from Yemen attributed to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. One of the suspects taken into custody Monday has been identified as a member of the Conspiracy of the Cells (or nuclei) of Fire, referred to as SPF, which is among a number of anarchist groups that have surfaced in the past several years.

“SPF has a track record of international actions,” says Brady Kiesling, a former American diplomat and expert on Greek terrorism. “It is definitely an anarchist group looking for a symbolic gesture.”

Security experts say they have recently noticed an uptick in Internet chatter among anarchist groups looking to make a statement about the economic crisis in Greece and Europe, and to strike out against countries where anarchists are currently imprisoned. They say that could explain the selection of embassies that were targeted since Monday.

“These letter bombs were not strong enough to kill anyone,” says Mary Bossis, a terrorism expert at the University of Piraeus. “But they were strong enough to send a message around the world.”

There were no injuries in the explosions at the Swiss and Russian embassies on Tuesday, and police were able to intercept and detonate parcel bombs addressed to the Bulgarian, Chilean, and German embassies.

Today’s bombs followed botched attempts to send explosive parcels to the office of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the Dutch, Belgian, and Mexican embassies Monday. A suspicious package sent Tuesday to the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel marked with the Greek economic ministry’s return address may also be connected.

On Monday, the Greek police apprehended two men, ages 22 and 24 at a courier center in the Athens neighborhood of Pangrati. They were reportedly armed with pistols and bulletproof vests and allegedly caught with explosive parcels. A courier company employee became suspicious of the men because of their wigs and baseball caps.

The younger of the two suspects has been identified as the member of SPF, one of the groups that has risen to prominence in the last few years, especialy since Dec. 6, 2008 when the shooting death of a 15-year-old boy by police set off nationwide youth riots.

Embassies in Greece have been on full alert following the bombings that began Monday. The German and Bulgarian embassies notified the police of suspicious packages and they were disposed of in controlled detonations. A courier handed over another package addressed to the Chilean embassy.

Greeks have become somewhat accustomed to anarchists setting off bombs from time to time, typically without injury. But this recent increase, coupled with several recent fatalities, will do little to generate much sympathy for their cause, say security experts. An Afghan boy and his mother were killed in March when he accidentally set off a bomb while rummaging through a dumpster. On June 24, a booby-trapped parcel addressed to minister Michalis Chrisochoides killed top aide George Vassilakis.

“Greeks have an understanding with their terrorists,” Mr. Kiesling says. “You don’t hurt anybody and we don’t look for you too hard.”

The mistakes made by the two men caught on Monday practically delivered them to the police, Kiesling says.

“The members of these groups are young amateurs,” adds Ms. Bossis. “But they are inventive amateurs and dangerous.”

By csmonitor.com

A police officer prepares for a controlled explosion of a suspect package in Athens, Greece, Monday. Petros Giannakouris/AP

Greek police have arrested four people after uncovering a plot to send parcel bombs to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and three foreign embassies in Athens.

The parcel addressed to Mr Sarkozy was found in the hands of two suspected far-left militants after a similar package intended for the Mexican embassy in the Greek capital detonated inside a courier company and injured an employee.

Police said one of the four people arrested was a suspected member of an obscure group that specialises in arson attacks on offices and homes of politicians, Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei.

From a postal slip found on the suspects, the police tracked down and exploded a second parcel at a neighbouring courier company, addressed to the Dutch embassy.

Two more devices found on the detainees were intended for the French President and the Belgian embassy, the police said.

The Dutch foreign ministry said it had been informed by the Greek authorities “and remain in close contact with them.”

Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei had also planted a small explosive device in a bin outside the Greek parliament in January, after police claimed to have arrested several of the group’s members in raids around the capital.

Attacks on government and police targets are relatively frequent in Greece and are commonly attributed to left-wing extremists.

By telegraph.co.uk

A police explosive expert prepares a controlled blast near a courier service in the Athens suburb of Pangrati Photo: AP

MULTAN, Pakistan — A bomb planted on a motorcycle exploded at the gate of a famous Sufi shrine in central Pakistan during morning prayers Monday, killing at least five people, officials said.

The blast at the Farid Shakar Ganj shrine in Punjab province was the latest in a string of attacks targeting Sufi shrines in Pakistan. Islamist militants often target Sufis, whose mystical practices clash with their hardline interpretation of Islam.

The dead from Monday’s blast included at least one woman, said Maher Aslam Hayat, a senior government official in the Pak Pattan district where the shrine is located. At least 13 others were wounded in the explosion, he said.

The bombing significantly damaged a row of shops outside the shrine, said Hayat. But the shrine itself, which is dedicated to a 12th century Sufi saint, was largely undamaged, he said.

Local TV footage showed the twisted and charred body of the motorcycle on which the bomb was planted. It also showed large piles of broken wood and chunks of concrete from the shops damaged by the blast.

After the attack, a top Sufi scholar, Mufti Muneebur Rehman, criticized the government for not doing enough to protect the Sufi population. Pakistan is 95 percent Muslim, and the majority practice Sufi-influenced Islam.

“Our rulers are too busy serving foreign masters and have not prioritized protecting the people and sacred places from terrorists,” said Rehman.

Earlier this month, two suspected suicide bombers attacked a beloved Sufi shrine in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, killing at least eight people and wounding 65 others.

A suicide attack in July killed 47 people at the nation’s most revered Sufi shrine, Data Darbar in the eastern city of Lahore. That attack infuriated many Pakistanis, who saw it as an unjustified assault on peaceful civilians.

The government has waged a sustained military campaign against militants based in its semiautonomous tribal region along the Afghan border who have declared war against the Pakistani state. But militant violence remains a problem.

A roadside bomb struck a passenger van in the Orakzai tribal region on Monday, killing three people and wounding two others, said Aurangzeb Khan, a local government administrator. The blast tore apart the vehicle, which was passing near the village of Tanda.

The Pakistani military declared victory in Orakzai in June after pounding Taliban militants in the area for months with airstrikes and artillery. But militant attacks and military operations in the area have continued.

Army helicopter gunships pounded suspected militant hideouts in Orakzai on Sunday, killing 15 alleged insurgents, said Jehanzeb Khan, another local government official.

By foxnews.com

Oct. 25, 2010: In this photo released by China's Xinhua news agency, people gather at the blast site in Pak Pattan, a city in Pakistan's Punjab province, early Monday morning

More than five years after the attacks brought terror to the capital, bereaved families will finally have the chance to ask officials questions about whether their loved ones could have been saved.

The inquest, which gets under way at the Royal Courts of Justice today, will have a wide-ranging remit to examine whether the emergency services’ response was adequate and whether MI5 and the police could have prevented the 2005 atrocities.

Four suicide bombers armed with home-made explosives packed into rucksacks launched co-ordinated attacks on three Tube trains and a bus on July 7, 2005, in Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity since the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

It has taken so long to hold the inquests because they could not start until after the trial of three men accused of helping the attackers choose their targets.

The trio were cleared of the charge at Kingston Crown Court last year, although two of them were convicted of conspiracy to attend a terrorist training camp.

Lady Justice Hallett, who will chair the inquest, is sitting without a jury.

She has already ruled the proceedings will have a wide remit, examining all four bombing scenes to determine whether more could have been done to save the victims at each bomb site.

By foxnews.com

In this July 7, 2005 file photo, a forensic officer walks next to the wreckage of a double decker bus with its top blown off and damaged cars scattered on the road at Tavistock Square in central London.

How many cease-fires can you announce and break before everyone stops paying attention?

Spaniards inured to cease-fire announcements by the violent Basque separatist group ETA were mulling whether the latest one holds anything different or will fail like the others to end Europe’s last major armed militancy.

The government on Monday swiftly ruled out holding negotiations on a Basque homeland and rejected Sunday’s truce as a desperate gambit by an extremist group staggering after the arrests of its leaders.

Spain claimed the cease-fire was just another gambit by ETA in order to buy time, regroup and rearm. And a major newspaper, El Mundo, ran a cartoon Monday of a hooded ETA gunman in a traditional Basque beret offering an olive branch — albeit one that stuck out of a gun barrel.

Since launching its campaign for an independent Basque homeland in the late 1960s and killing more than 825 people in the process, ETA has announced 11 cease-fires, the last of them in 2006, which it called permanent.

Promising peace talks with the government ensued but quickly went nowhere, and nine months later ETA reverted to violence with a massive car bomb that killed two Ecuadorean immigrants in a parking garage at Madrid’s Barajas Airport.

This time, inside, not outside, forces appear to have prompted three masked ETA members to declare a cease-fire Sunday in front of a ETA sign with a snake slithering around an ax. While ETA historically has called the shots, the pressure for a new halt to violence seems to have come from the group’s own political supporters.

Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said Monday that when ETA shocked Spain by abruptly ending the 2006 cease-fire, “many people in the Basque nationalist movement woke up and said, ‘With this ETA we are not going to get anywhere.’”

Those divisions have been growing as ETA’s banned political wing, Batasuna, apparently came to the conclusion that bombs and bullets were doing nothing to achieve the goal of Basque independence.

ETA’s last deadly attack was a July 2009 car bomb that killed two policemen on the island of Mallorca. But Spain has no tolerance for terrorism now after Islamic militants killed 191 people in a 2004 train bombing in Madrid.

By Daniel Woolls

In this video grab provided by the Basque militant separatist group ETA to the newspaper website Gara.net on Sunday, Sept. 5, 2010, three masked ETA members declare a cease-fire in their efforts to establish an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and southwestern France.

Three Americans were killed in Afghanistan Saturday, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said.

Two of the U.S. service members died in a bombing in southern Afghanistan. The third death followed an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan. No other details were immediately available.

The casualties came as the top American diplomat and top U.S. general in Afghanistan reassured the troubled nation of U.S. support.

“Now looking ahead, we’re all focused together on the upcoming parliamentary elections and the key test will be the satisfaction of the Afghan people with the progress that’s going to come from their hard work as they approach the elections — their incredible reputation for perseverance and their indomitable spirit,” said Amb. Karl Eikenberry, speaking to Afghan journalists with Gen. David Petraeus.

Meanwhile, Afghan and coalition soldiers fought off assaults on two military bases that left more than 20 insurgents dead, ISAF said.

The fighting occurred in Khost province, a volatile region on Afghanistan’s rugged border with Pakistan.

Insurgents clad in U.S. military uniforms and wielding rocket-propelled grenades and small arms “simultaneously launched attacks” against Forward Operating Base Salerno and Forward Operation Base Chapman, ISAF said.

Chapman is the same base where a suicide bomber killed seven CIA officers on December 30.

Troops killed about 15 insurgents at Salerno and six at Chapman. Five insurgent fighters were captured and were in ISAF custody.

A Haqqani network operative who helps carry out bombings and two other insurgents died in an airstrike while fleeing Salerno in a vehicle. Two insurgents who got into Salerno were killed by soldiers. The Haqqani network is a militant group with ties to al Qaeda.

“We are tightening our grip on the insurgents and as a result they are attempting anything and everything as a last ditch effort,” said U.S. Army Col. Rafael Torres, ISAF spokesman. “The insurgents gave their best effort and came up short.”

Afghan police and ISAF members seized a car bomb and a vehicle carrying ammunition. Forces also seized suicide vests, rifles and unexploded munitions.

Four ISAF soldiers were injured, and three have returned to duty. The fourth was set to return to duty soon. No base facilities were damaged.

Also Saturday, an Afghan civilian was killed by a suicide attacker in southeastern Paktika province, ISAF said. Seven people also were wounded when the insurgent detonated a suicide vest.

By the CNN

EDS NOTE GRAPHIC CONTENT- An Afghan National Army soldier stands near the body of a suicide attacker near a NATO base in Khost province of Afghanistan, Saturday, Aug. 28, 2010. Insurgents launched pre-dawn attacks Saturday on a major NATO base in eastern Afghanistan and a nearby camp where seven CIA employees were killed last year in a suicide bombing. NATO said there were no coalition casualties and the attacks were repelled. It said 13 insurgents were killed, four of whom were wearing suicide vests, and five captured. (AP Photo/Nishanuddin Khan)

A car that exploded outside a police station in Londonderry contained 200lbs of homemade explosives, police have said.

Dissident republicans are being blamed for the attack.

No-one was injured in the attack which happened at 0320 BST but several businesses were badly damaged in the blast.

Police said the bomb was loaded into a hijacked taxi and the driver ordered at gunpoint to drive to the station.

Divisional Commander Steve Martin said it was fortunate no-one was killed because the device went off more than 20 minutes before a warning said it would.

He said two men hijacked a taxi in the Bogside. The driver was taken to Glenfada Park where the bomb was loaded into the car.

The driver was then ordered at gunpoint to drive to Strand Road police station and warned he would be shot if he did not.

Supt Martin said they had been warned the device would go off in 45 minutes, however only 23 minutes had passed when the car exploded.

He also revealed that a policeman risked his own life when he walked past the bomb twice to bring to safety staff at a nearby fast food shop.

The first and deputy first ministers have condemned the attack.

Peter Robinson said he was thankful there was no loss of life.

“Using a taxi driver to deliver the device shows the cowardice of those behind the attack and my sympathies are with him and all those targeted,” he said.

Martin McGuinness said those who planned the attack were an “embarrassment” to the people of Derry.

“It’s about trying to undermine the peace process, about trying to undermine Sinn Fein’s peace strategy,” he said.

“If they think they will destroy the political institutions the people of Ireland voted for, if they think they’re going to destroy the working relationship I have with Peter Robinson, if they think they will undermine the peace process they are living in cloud cuckoo land.”

SDLP Mayor of Derry Colum Eastwood blamed dissident republicans for the attack.

“Police didn’t even have time to evacuate a nursing home or apartments right beside the police station.

“We are very lucky today not to be talking about fatalities. It’s an attack not just on the police but the entire community.”

‘Panic’
Lotfi Jalloul, whose kebab shop was destroyed in the blast, had been cleaning up for the night when he saw the car arrive at the police station.

“I thought he was a taxi driver picking up a passenger but about 15 minutes later, we were evacuated by the police,” he said.

“There was a lot of panic. I left the money in the till and didn’t even get the chance to pull down the shutters - thank God we got out of there, I can’t believe we’re still alive.”

He said he had been told his business had been destroyed by the explosion but had not yet been able to see what damage was caused because the area remains cordoned off.

Conor Kelly, who lives in an apartment block near the police station, said it had been a terrifying experience.

“I was still awake and reading when I heard an enormous noise like thunder and saw debris flying past my window,” he said.

“There were no alarms or attempts to evacuate the building.”

He said the front of a fast food outlet had been “ripped to shreds” and other buildings had windows blown out.

In May, a mortar bomb was fired at the same police station. It struck a wall but failed to explode.

The attack comes just weeks after Derry was picked to be UK City of Culture in 2013.

SDLP MP Mark Durkan said the bombing was “a cowardly, dangerous and vulgar act”.

“Those responsible for this incident have achieved nothing and this campaign of violence will achieve nothing,” he said.

By BBC

Forensic scientists examined the taxi destroyed by the bomb.

BAGHDAD — On Sunday, a journalist for Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language news channel, sat in the newsroom and explained that his staff had recently returned to the bureau after being forced to leave for weeks by threats from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

“Thank God we are able to work,” said the journalist, Mohammed Zuhair, the chief of the channel’s newsroom.

Less than 24 hours later, a suicide bomber drove a white minibus packed with explosives past several checkpoints and detonated the vehicle in front of the news channel’s office, killing 6 and wounding 16. The dead included security guards and a cafeteria worker, but no journalists. Among the wounded was a former Iraqi deputy prime minister who lives nearby. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia took responsibility for the bombing.

On Monday evening, two other explosions struck Shiite pilgrims as they marched from Najaf to Karbala to commemorate the birthday of Imam Mahdi, a revered Shiite saint. The attacks, which also bore the hallmark of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, killed close to 20 and wounded more than 50, according to officials in Baghdad and Karbala.

While the bombing at Al Arabiya’s office spared the newsroom, the attack was a brutal reminder of the dangers Iraqis face in practicing journalism, which they have had the freedom to do for only seven years. The war here has been the deadliest in history for journalists. More than 140 have been killed in Iraq since the war began, the vast majority of them Iraqis, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Many newsrooms in Baghdad display photographs of slain colleagues. At Al Sumariya, another popular TV news channel, large photos in a hallway serve as reminders of two correspondents who were kidnapped and killed.

The attack on Monday came as officials have again been debating proposals for a new law to protect journalists — in the event that the country’s political class can end the nearly five-month stalemate that has followed March’s parliamentary elections and form a new government.

Among the ideas are to provide government protection for targeted journalists; offer compensation to the families of those killed; and set up regulations aimed at protecting the newsgathering process. A new law might also elevate a crime against a journalist to a higher level, a parallel to hate crime laws in the United States.

A draft law was sent to Parliament last year but never enacted; many here expect it will be taken up again. Officials recently held a workshop to discuss the proposals.

Mr. Zuhair, who was not hurt in Monday’s bombing, said a law would “give a capability to journalists and a stature.”

The need for a media law — which could also impose fines for publishing false information — is itself a matter of debate. Mindful of prior abuses — when the press was a propaganda arm of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, and the death penalty could be imposed for criticizing his government — some want no government interference in the news media, even with the aim of protection. Last year, journalists in Baghdad protested against a media law, fearing it would restrict them.

Feryad Rawandozi straddles the worlds of politics and the press. A former member of Parliament, he is the spokesman for the Kurdistan Alliance, a coalition of politicians from Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region, and a newspaper columnist. His position is nuanced.

“Without a law, we cannot compensate families for losing their sons,” Mr. Rawandozi said. “Some areas are still very dangerous for journalists, but not all the Iraqi areas.”

As a politician, however, he believes the Iraqi press is not advanced enough to police itself on ethics, and favors a law to regulate the profession. “Some people think we need some sort of regulation because we are not exercising freedom of speech in the right way,” he said, mentioning an article that he said misquoted him. “It’s very hard to say that journalists stick with the ethics.”

Iraq’s Constitution protects freedom of opinion and speech, but some Western groups are urging the government to give the media a deeper constitutional imprimatur. A group of press advocacy groups working with Unesco recently published an open letter advocating the passage of a freedom of information law, writing, “We still lack the legal mechanism that guarantees the citizen’s right to have access to information.”

The Iraqi government is wading into the affairs of the news media in other ways, recently establishing a special press court to adjudicate libel offenses and press freedom issues. Western advocates have criticized the court, saying the government has not disclosed enough information about the court’s procedures.

“A specialized press court is hardly the solution to the problems Iraqi journalists face on a daily basis,” Mohamed Abdel Dayem, Middle East director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a recent statement. “Historically, press courts have been used for restriction rather than protection.”

On Monday afternoon, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia took credit for the bombing at Al Arabiya on a Web site it often uses to communicate, suggesting the attack was in response to a broadcast about the influence of the extremist group. The program was called “Creation of Death.”

“Wait for more,” the group’s statement said.

The capabilities of the group, which is homegrown but is believed to have some foreign leadership, have diminished in recent months with the killing of many top leaders, but it is still able to regularly carry out suicide attacks against institutions of Iraq’s nascent democracy.

Ayad Allawi, the former interim prime minister whose coalition won the most seats in the parliamentary elections, went to the scene of the bombing.

About a month ago the Interior Ministry notified Al Arabiya, whose headquarters are in Dubai, that it had intelligence that the network’s Baghdad office might become a target of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, according to Tariq Maher, a local correspondent for the channel who is a former employee of The New York Times in Baghdad.

The network’s Iraqi staff decamped to the Al-Rasheed Hotel for several weeks, and only in the last couple of days had returned to its office, with a scaled-down staff and added protection from the Interior Ministry, according to Mr. Maher, who was in the building when the explosion occurred. He had been up late working, and he and a colleague had gone to bed for a nap just after 9 a.m. He said a blanket that he pulled over his head saved him from falling debris.

“That is how the miracle happened, why we survived,” he said. “Two guards turned completely to ash.”

By TIM ARANGO

Soldiers inspected the Baghdad office of Al Arabiya, an Arabic news channel, after a bombing Monday in which six people died.

A car bomb has exploded in a marketplace near the Iraqi city of Baquba killing at least 15 people and wounding more than 40, police say.

The blast went off near a mosque in the predominantly Shia village of Abu Sayda, about 45 miles (70km) north of the capital, Baghdad.

Police said the latest explosion caused buildings to collapse, and women and children were among those injured.

The Baquba area has suffered several attacks in recent days.

At least six people died in a car bombing on Monday near a restaurant in Baquba, and on Tuesday several Iranian pilgrims were injured in an attack west of the city.

Officials have imposed a curfew in Abu Sayda in case there are more explosive devices planted nearby.

Baquba is the ethnically mixed capital of Diyala province, which has become a bastion of al-Qaeda in Iraq and remains one of the country’s most unstable provinces.

A US soldier was killed on Wednesday as his convoy was hit by a roadside bomb as it drove through Diyala.

Meanwhile, Iraqi politicians have not yet agreed on the formation of a new government more than four months after parliamentary elections.

The BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse, in Baghdad, says there are fears that the longer this political stalemate continues, the easier it will be for insurgents to exploit the power vacuum.

By BBC

There have been a string of attacks in the area lately.