Friday, March 30, 2007
INM daily summary – 30 March 2007
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- One of the 15 British service members held captive in Iran appeared Friday on the government's Arabic-language TV and apologized for entering Iranian waters "without permission."
- The U.S. military announced the capture Friday of a suspected militant linked to the import into Iraq of explosively formed projectiles, or EFPs, that the Americans have asserted are coming from Iran.
- Japan's Cabinet approved a two-year extension of the country's air force mission in Iraq after it expires in July, the foreign minister announced Friday.
- Iran's official Arabic-language TV channel said Friday it would broadcast a confession by one of the 15 British sailors and marines detained last week.
- President Jalal Talabani invited Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to send a delegation to carry out investigations in Kirkuk.
- Saudi King Abdullah says U.S. in Iraq is "illegitimate foreign occupation”.
- The Arab summit approved a draft resolution on developments in Iraq, which asserts Iraq’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, its Arab and Islamic identity and rejects any plans to divide it.
- Gen. David Petraeus said Thursday that revenge-seeking police apparently were behind retribution killings in northwestern Iraq, but he blamed al-Qaida for starting the carnage with a bombing.
- Suicide bombers killed nearly 130 people and wounding more than 150 in a crowded market in a Shiite district of Baghdad and a mainly Shiite town on Thursday.
- Iraqi insurgents are increasingly hitting Baghdad's fortresslike Green Zone with rockets and mortar shells, officials said Wednesday.
- The World Bank on Thursday approved $124 million in credit for an electricity reconstruction project in Iraq.
- Senate Democrats pushed through a bill Thursday requiring President Bush to start withdrawing troops from "the civil war in Iraq."
- The US military -- increasing its reliance on robots in war -- soon will be using explosive-sniffing robots to better detect roadside bombs.
- The US State Department's Senior Iraq Coordinator stated that the $12.5 billion given to Iraq should be released in the form of reconstruction projects.
- Iraqi authorities have re-arrested 18 policemen who had been detained but then freed over the reprisal killing of up to 70 Sunni Arab men in Tal Afar.
- The letter released yesterday by Iran, which claims it was written by the British sailor Faye Turney to her parents.
