Middle Orient

BAGHDAD — While condemning in public the sectarian death squads that gunned down 40 people on Sunday in a Sunni part of Baghdad, some Iraqi Shiite leaders say in private retaliation for Sunni insurgent bomb attacks is understandable.

SANAA (AP) — Nineteen alleged Al Qaeda members accused of plotting to assassinate Westerners and blow up a hotel used by Americans were acquitted by a judge who also exonerated some of fighting US troops in Iraq.

CAIRO (AFP) — Hundreds of journalists demonstrated Sunday outside the Egyptian parliament where a draft bill allowing jail sentences for journalists and preventing them from investigating fraud was being debated.

MOGADISHU (AFP) — Somali Islamic fighters on Sunday declared “absolute” victory over the remaining warlords in the lawless capital Mogadishu after deadly clashes that claimed at least 21 lives, marking the end of the notorious warlords’ rule in the Indian Ocean city.

ISTANBUL  (AP) — About 20,000 pro-Islamic Turks chanted “Down with Israel” to protest Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, a day after the Turkish foreign minister called the offensive in response to the abduction of an Israeli soldier “horrifying”.

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Underneath the blazing sun at Baghdad’s Allawi bus station hundreds of families from across Iraq’s sectarian divide await the arrival of the latest batch of freed prisoners in the hope of finding a long-missing relative.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Masked Shiite gunmen rampaged through a tense neighbourhood of west Baghdad on Sunday, dragging Sunnis from their cars, picking them out on the street and killing at least 41 in a dramatic escalation of sectarian violence.

The United States’ global energy-control strategy, it’s now clear to most, was the actual reason for the highly costly regime change in Iraq, euphemistically dubbed “democracy” by Washington. But while it is preoccupied with implanting democracy in the Middle East, the United States is quietly being outflanked in the rush …

BAGHDAD (Reuters) — Gunmen pulled the deputy electricity minister from his car in a busy Baghdad street on Tuesday, briefly kidnapping him and 19 bodyguards in an attack that underlined the vulnerability of Iraq’s new government.

BAGHDAD — No sooner had US authorities filed rape and murder charges against ex-soldier Steven D. Green than an account of the incident appeared on an Islamist website in the name of an insurgent group, the Mujahedeen Army. It promised “harsh punishment” for the alleged crime.