Gunmen kill 21 northeast of Baghdad
SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq - Gunmen killed 21 people — many of them high school students — after dragging them off buses northeast of Baghdad, officials said. Four Sunni Arabs were spared and the dead were all Shiites or Kurds.
He said the gunmen dragged 26 people from the buses, separated four Sunni Arabs from the group, and shot the rest.
According to the joint operations center in Baqouba, the incident apparently took place in Ain Laila. The town is between Qara Tappah and Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province — which in recent weeks has been transformed into a sectarian powder keg.
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Iraqi parliamentary session suspended
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The Iraqi parliament postponed its session Sunday after the main political blocs failed to agree on candidates for key security posts, the deputy speaker said.
The decision came as violence surged in the country and despite urgent last-minute efforts by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to hammer out an agreement between Iraq ‘s fractious ethnic and sectarian groups on who will head the Defense and Interior Ministries.
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Firefight breaks out near mosque in Basra
BASRA, Iraq - A gunbattle broke out after Iraqi police surrounded a Sunni Arab mosque in the southern city of Basra early Sunday, leaving at least nine people dead, officials said.
The standoff occurred hours after police stormed four Sunni mosques in Iraq ‘s second-largest city late Saturday and Sunni clerics called on followers to gather in one of the shrines to protect it.
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