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Son of Sistani aide assassinated

KUT: The son of an aide to Shia spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was assassinated southeast of Baghdad on Sunday, police said.

Ali al-Khatib, the 30-year-old son of Sheikh Habib al-Khatib, was shot dead by a lone gunman in an internet cafe in the town of Naamaniya, police officer Ali Jassem said. His father, Sistani’s aide in Wasit province, survived an assassination attempt two months ago.

US forces carried out a series of raids in Iraq’s troubled northern city of Mosul, the military said on Sunday, as American and Iraqi authorities scramble to prepare for elections there in the face of mass resignations of polling staff and police. In the Mosul area, the US Army’s Stryker Brigade Combat Team detained 11 suspected insurgents, including an alleged cell leader, and seized weapons and bomb making material in several weekend raids — part of the military’s strategy to try to secure the city short of launching an all-out offensive.

East of Mosul, a Katyusha rocket slammed into a home near the Kurdish regional parliament building in Irbil where leaders of the two main Kurdish parties were meeting to discuss the election, a police official said on Sunday. Also on Sunday, insurgents attacked an Iraqi National Guard patrol south of Baghdad, injuring two guardsmen, one of them critically, police Lt. Adnan Abdul-Allah said.

West of the capital, in the city of Ramadi, five explosions rocked a joint US-Iraqi National Guard base, sending columns of smoke rising above the area, witnesses said. Sporadic clashes were reported in the city center.

Elsewhere, US troops fired on a car that sped toward them near the central city of Samarra on Sunday morning, wounding two people, the military said. A spokesman said ground troops fired warning shots before aiming directly at the vehicle. The driver and a passenger were wounded.

Iraqi police and several witnesses, however, reported that four people were killed and that the vehicle was hit by tank fire. A major insurgent group claimed responsibility on Sunday for kidnapping 15 Iraqi National Guard members who were reported missing last week. The 15 guardsmen had been pulled from a bus near their base in the town of Hit, 140 kilometres west of Baghdad. agencies

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