Iraq battle after militia arrest

Two passers-by have died in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, after clashes between security forces and one of the militias which are backed by US forces.

The gun battle in the Fadil district of the city erupted shortly after the leader of the local Awakening group, Adil Mashadani, was arrested.

One account says US troops helped with the arrest alongside the Iraqi army.

Fadil was run by al-Qaeda in Iraq for most of 2006 and 2007, but they were driven out by the Awakening movement.

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Russia to end Chechnya anti-terror mission

President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday ordered the Russian authorities to move towards ending the anti-terror operation in Chechnya that has been in place for the last decade.

He ordered the national anti-terror committee to consider the future of the regime, which was put in place as Moscow was starting its second war against separatists in the Muslim Caucasus region in 1990.

“I propose that the national anti-terror committee considers the question about the anti-terror operation and takes the necessary decisions,” Medvedev said in comments broadcast on state television.

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Islamist threat to Turkey’s secular system

Turkish secularism on the ropes. Sharia is advancing in what is always held out to be that exemplary beacon of democracy in the Islamic world, Turkey. The reasons why Sharia supremacists are advancing there have not — unsurprisingly — been sufficiently explored by Western analysts, who of course dismiss out of hand the appeal of a call to restore Islamic authenticity.

“Erdogan Set for Election Win That May Revive Tension Over Islam,” by Ben Holland for Bloomberg, March 27

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is set to win a fresh mandate from voters that may embolden his challenge to the country’s military and courts, which see him as an Islamist threat to Turkey’s secular system.

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Turk Arrested Over Kurds’ Killings in ’90s

A Turkish officer was arrested Wednesday in connection with suspected extrajudicial killings in the country’s predominantly Kurdish southeast in the 1990s.

A court in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, issued the arrest warrant for the officer, Col. Cemal Temizoz, pending a trial.

Colonel Temizoz served near the town of Cizre, about 40 miles from the Iraqi border in Turkey’s southeast, between 1993 and 1996, when hundreds of Kurdish civilians and activists were said to have been killed by security forces with links to the military.

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Blast rips through Baghdad crowd

A car bomb blast which ripped through a crowd of shoppers near a bus stop in northern Baghdad has killed at least 20 people and injured more than 35.

The bomb went off near a busy market in the capital’s Shaab district, a mainly Shia area, officials say.

Iraqi police believe it was a deliberate attempt to kill the maximum number of civilians possible.

Violence has declined in Iraq recently but on Monday, a suicide bomber killed 25 people in the north of the country.

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Sunni fighters say Iraq didn’t keep job promises

The American military marked another milestone the other day in the initiative perhaps most responsible for taming the violence in Iraq: All but 10,000 of the 94,000 Sunni militiamen — many of them former insurgents who agreed, for cash, to stop killing American soldiers — had been turned over to the control of the Iraqi military.

The same day, one group of the fighters north of Baghdad announced they were resigning from their Awakening Council, the Iraqi name for what the Americans call the Sons of Iraq. And in the town of Salman Pak, councils in southern Baghdad and its suburbs, an area once called “the ring of death,” met to denounce Iraqi efforts to integrate them.

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Suicide attack on Iraqi funeral

At least 25 people have been killed by a suicide bomber in the Iraqi province of Diyala, police say.

Dozens of people are also reported to have been hurt in the attack.

Sources told the BBC the suicide attacker targeted a funeral in the town of Jalawla, 115km (70 miles) north-east of the capital, Baghdad.

It was the second bomb attack in Iraq on Monday, with an earlier explosion near the capital. Baghdad, killing at least eight people.

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Turkey attacks Kurd rebel targets in northern Iraq

Turkish warplanes struck Kurdish guerrilla targets in northern Iraq on Thursday, state-run news agency Anatolian reported a military official as saying on Friday.

Turkey’s military has waged offensives both in Turkish territory and across the border in northern Iraq against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

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Russia tries new tactics to quell insurgency

The man chosen to rein in Russia’s most violent insurgency says he will tackle the root of the problem by stamping out the official corruption driving young men into the arms of Islamist rebels.

The approach set out by former paratroop commander Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the new leader of the Muslim Ingushetia region, marks a stark departure from the focus on tough security operations that critics said had been dragging the region into a civil war.

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Russia may freeze sale of S-300 missile systems to Iran

Russia may freeze the sale of state-of-the-art S-300 missile systems to Iran, a Moscow source was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying Tuesday.

“Such a possibility cannot be ruled out. A decision on this issue should be made at the political level, because the contract has moved outside the purely commercial framework,” an unnamed source told the news agency.

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