Anti-terror chief among seven killed in Iraq blasts

Co-ordinated early-morning bombings on Thursday at the homes of four police officers in the western Iraqi town of Heet killed seven people, including the town's anti-terror chief, police said."At 3:00 am, men planted bombs around the bedrooms of four houses belonging to members of the police force, including Major Walid al-Heeti, the head of Heet's anti-terror department," said Lieutenant Colonel Fadhil Nimrawi, the head of the town's emergency response unit.

The war in Iraq cost the lives of 4,489 Americans, with another 51,778 wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed or injured. We wasted over a trillion dollars in the process.Why? To remove Saddam Hussein.Hussein was a brutal dictator, but that battle clearly was not our. And at least under Hussein, religious freedom existed. It doesn't now. Chaldean Catholics are targeted and killed simply because they are Catholic.There were no Al Qaeda forces in Iraq either. Hussein, a secular dictator, had no use for them.

By Suadad al-SalhyBAGHDAD (Reuters) - Sunni insurgents clashed with troops and briefly occupied a town in northern Iraq on Friday night, the latest development in an escalating turf war with the Shi'ite-led government that has killed at least 21 people in the past two days, police said.Dozens of militants in SUVs drove into the small town of al-Sainiyah near Baiji, some 180 km (112 miles) north of Baghdad, after bombing the local police headquarters and fought troops for several hours overnight, witnesses said on Saturday.

A suicide bomber on Sunday detonated a car packed with explosives, killing five people, at a petrol station in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi, medical and security officials said.An elderly woman was among those killed in the blast, which also wounded 29.The attack took place at 11:30 am (0830 GMT) in the centre of the city, the capital of Sunni Anbar province that lies 100 kilometres (60 miles) west of Baghdad.

TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - At least 17 people were killed in attacks across Iraq on Sunday as troops fought to evict Islamist militants from the northern town of Sulaiman Pek, security sources and medics said.Armored vehicles and special police forces with heavy machineguns arrived in Sulaiman Pek to reinforce troops battling there for several days backed by helicopters gunships.

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber rammed his car into a U.S. convoy in Kabul on Thursday, killing at least 15 people including two American soldiers and four civilian contractors, officials said. The brazen attack made May the deadliest month this year for coalition forces. Cmdr. Bill Speaks, a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Secretary, confirmed that the two soldiers from the NATO military coalition who were killed in the bombing were Americans. He would not comment on the nationalities of the civilian contractors.

Gunmen killed five Iraqi policemen in a drive-by shooting at a checkpoint in Anbar province, west of Baghdad, on Sunday, a police officer said."At 8:30 am (0530 GMT), gunmen riding in a car and carrying automatic weapons killed five policemen guarding a checkpoint, before fleeing," the officer in the provincial capital Ramadi said.He said the gunmen struck in the desert town of Rutbah, on the main highway leading from Baghdad towards Amman and Damascus.

Twin suicide blasts in the western city of Ramadi on Wednesday killed 23 people and left the Anbar provincial governor wounded in the latest attacks against government targets to hit Iraq.The co-ordinated bombings, which left a total of 30 people wounded, struck the governorate offices in the centre of Anbar's provincial capital and also killed and wounded senior security officials.The first attack struck near a security checkpoint at a road junction leading to the governorate offices in the centre of the Anbar provincial capital at around 9:30 am (0630 GMT).