Casualty Count

A suicide bomber killed four policemen and a civilian and wounded eight people today when he blew up his car outside a police station in Iraq. The bomber targeted Rasheed police station in the town of Yusufiya, south of Baghdad.

More than 800 U.S. troops have lost their lives in Iraq from Feb. 1, when additional troops started arriving for the surge, through Dec. 21. The Department of Defense reports the death of another U.S. soldier in a suicide bombing...

There's a lull in the fighting in Baghdad as the surge in American troops helps to stabilize the capital. The U.S. military struck deals for peace with Iraqi militias on all sides and in the process gave up on religious reconciliation...

The lives of millions of Iraqi children are still blighted by violence, poor nutrition and disrupted education more than four years after the US-led invasion, UNICEF said on Friday. The United Nations Children's Fund said in a report that few teenagers...

Two years after helping to bring to power a government led by Shiite religious parties, Iraq's paramount Shiite clerics find their influence diminished as their followers criticize them for backing a political alliance that has failed...

A suspected roadside bomb exploded next to a British military armoured vehicle east of Basra International Airport, where British forces in Iraq are based, but there were no casualties from the blast, a British military official said.

When Leila Nasser was six months pregnant, U.S. soldiers burst into her house and wrestled away her husband, Mohammed Amin, who was asleep on the roof, trying to escape the summer heat.

In the first month that they were in Iraq, someone threatened, shot at or tried to blow up the soldiers of the Kentucky National Guard's B Battery, 2nd Battalion, 138th Field Artillery 12 times. Last month, there were only three such incidents.

An ex-Soldier sent home early from Iraq for treatment of a stress- related illness and later discharged is in the El Paso County jail on suspicion of shooting a fellow infantryman to death early Dec. 15.

Veterans coming home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with debilitating mental ailments are discovering that their disability payments from the government vary widely depending on where they live, a McClatchy Newspapers analysis has found.

Blood and ouzo mingled on the sidewalk outside a shattered Baghdad liquor store on Thursday after three people were killed in a car bombing directed at alcohol sellers in one of Baghdad’s most heavily protected areas.

The leader of the largest Shiite political party in Iraq told about 5,000 faithful who gathered for Islamic holy day prayers that U.S.-backed anti-al-Qaida groups — mostly comprised of Sunnis — should be on the side of government forces...

When American soldiers arrived in Baghdad in April 2003, Uday Hattem met them on the street. “Because at the beginning it was everything normal,” he said. “We talk with them; they are not afraid.”

A single trained marksman is suspected of killing seven British soldiers in separate attacks in Iraq, an inquest heard on Thursday. The sniper's victims are thought to include Cpl Rodney Wilson, who was killed when he was shot in the back...

A Multi-National Division - North Soldier and five Iraqi civilians were killed from a suicide vest attack while conducting combat operations in the Diyala province Dec. 20.

...the commander of the American detention facilities in Iraq is wondering aloud if holding all those detainees is breeding a "micro-insurgency" and asking whether it's time to begin releasing thousands of people.

More militants from Libya are turning up in Iraq, U.S. military researchers say. U.S. Military Academy researchers studying documents note the continuing predominance of Saudis among foreign fighters.

A roadside bomb killed one Iraqi soldier and wounded another when it targeted a joint patrol of police and Iraqi army in southern Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

A suicide bomber blew himself up outside a city council meeting in a town northeast of Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least six people, including a U.S. soldier, during a four-day Islamic holiday, the military said.

Under the embers of the wintry evening sun the Tigris river, usually as brown as old boots, had turned almost blood red. Its waters were calm but its oily sheen was disturbed by the oars of a rower as he sculled his way through the city's fractured heart.