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US artillery bombards Baghdad

BAGHDAD: The Iraqi capital awoke to a series of loud detonations on Sunday as US artillery pounded targets in southwest districts of the city.

“Eighteen rounds of artillery were fired from Forward Operating Base Falcon,” said US spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Chris Garver, without identifying the target of a salvo that could be heard 10 kilometres.

Occasional blasts could still be heard three hours after they began, and Garver could not say whether or not the operation would continue.

Brigadier General Qassim Atta, spokesman for the Iraqi forces involved in the security plan, told state television that the blasts were the result of a joint operation, but did not say what was causing them.

Separately, gunmen set fire to 15 fuel trucks heading to Anbar province on Sunday and kidnapped all trucks’ drivers, police said.

Major Abdulghani al-Dulaimi said the trucks were transporting fuel from the Baiji refinery, north of Baghdad, to western Anbar.

US forces captured at least 72 suspects linked to Al Qaeda and seized bomb-making materials in a series of raids in two Iraqi provinces on Sunday, the military said. The raids were carried out in Anbar and Salaheddin provinces in an attempt to “disrupt the Al Qaeda network,” it said in a statement.

In the biggest raid, the military netted 36 suspects with links to Al Qaeda in the town of Samarra in Salaheddin province, north of Baghdad, the military said. Troops also found 20 five-gallon drums of nitric acid and other bomb-making materials near Garmah, close to the former rebel bastion of Fallujah in Anbar province of western Iraq.

A well-known news reader from Iraqi state television was shot and wounded on Sunday in front of her Baghdad home, her network said. Amal al-Muderas was attacked by unidentified gunmen in the mixed Khadraa district of western Baghdad, security sources said, apparently the latest victim of attacks aimed at state-run Iraqiya television.

“She was wounded and she’s in the hospital,” said a senior colleague at Muderas’s station, on condition of anonymity. Medics at the city’s Al-Yarmukh hospital confirmed they were treating her. agencies

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