Middle Orient

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Violence raked the capital Monday as the general who will lead Iraqi forces in the coming security crackdown in Baghdad took charge and a senior U.S. military official said the much-vaunted joint operation with American forces to curb sectarian bloodshed would start “very soon thereafter.”

BEIRUT, Lebanon – Police and soldiers ringed a university Monday as students returned for the first time since a political spat in the cafeteria mushroomed into street riots that killed four people and inflamed Sunni-Shiite tensions.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Two people were killed in the capital early Monday when a mortar round slammed into a central Baghdad neighborhood and a bomb hidden in trash exploded on the city’s east side, police reported.

JERUSALEM – The one-story house Amer Abu Diab built on a steep east Jerusalem hillside last year had a low fence, two bedrooms, a living room and an asphalt driveway

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Two key members of radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s political and military organization were gunned down just days before the U.S. and Iraqi forces planned to open a massive security drive in Baghdad.

A U.S.-backed Iraqi security plan seen as a last-ditch attempt to halt violence in Baghdad will not produce results overnight, a U.S. general warned on Sunday, after a one-ton suicide truck bomb killed 135 people.

The dairy farmers’ bid for Tnuva Food Industries Ltd. has failed. Africa-Israel Investments Ltd. (TASE:AFIL; Pink Sheets:AFIVY) today notified the dairy farmers of the Israel

Syrian customs officers have thwarted an attempt to smuggle arms to Lebanon through an Iraqi truck, Syria’s official news agency, SANA, reported Sunday.

BRUSSELS, Belgium – The European Union on Sunday strongly condemned a weekend suicide attack in a Baghdad market which killed at least 132 people.

Gunmen from the rival Hamas and Fatah factions on Sunday began pulling back from their positions in the latest attempt to enforce a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.