Middle Orient

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. troops will on Sept. 1 hand over control of Iraq’s Anbar province, once the heart of a bloody Sunni Arab insurgency, reflecting a dramatic drop in violence across the country, an Iraqi official said on Thursday.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has reshuffled and replaced the head of a negotiating team seeking to finalize an agreement on the future presence of U.S. troops here, a senior Iraqi politician said on Thursday.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr extended indefinitely a ceasefire for his Mehdi militia on Thursday and ordered his followers to protest peacefully against the U.S. occupation.

GAZA (Reuters) – Israel on Thursday reopened its border crossings with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, two days after they were shut in response to rocket attacks.

TEHRAN (FNA)- Turkish National Education Minister Huseyin Celik arrived in Tehran on Tuesday to discuss bolstering of educational and cultural relations between the two countries.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia will face increased Western pressure on Wednesday when a senior British official flies to Ukraine to build a coalition to counter Russia’s conflict with ex-Soviet Georgia.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The United States asked Iraq for permission to maintain a troop presence there to 2015, but U.S. and Iraqi negotiators agreed to limit their authorization to 2011, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Gunmen kidnapped eight Iraqis from their homes on Saturday in a raid in the country’s volatile Diyala province, where al Qaeda militants continue to roam despite a crackdown by Iraqi security forces, police said.

KIRKUK (Reuters) – A suicide bomber killed at least five people and wounded eight more on Saturday in Iraq’s northern city of Kirkuk, police said.The bomber detonated a suicide vest in a car market in southern Kirkuk, said Major-General Torhan Abdul-Rahman, a senior police official in the city.

QARAH TAPPAH, Iraq (Reuters) – A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of police recruits in northern Iraq on Tuesday killing 28 people, in an attack that showed that parts of Iraq have yet to see the security gains felt elsewhere.