Iraq

A suicide bomber killed the deputy leader of Iraq's second-biggest Sunni Arab political bloc Sunday as he and other politicians met to discuss the upcoming provincial elections, the party's leader said. Hassan Zaidan Lahaibi of the Iraqi National Dialogue Front was killed by a suicide bomber who stormed his house, shot at guards and blew himself up in a crowded reception room, said Saleh Mutlak.

U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker on Thursday warned against a hasty withdrawal of American forces from Iraq and offered a sobering assessment of the country despite what he called its "remarkable transition" in the last two years. Crocker, in his last meeting with Western journalists before retiring next month, spoke a day after President Obama reiterated his desire to end the American presence in Iraq, where about 140,000 U.S. troops remain.

The suicide attacks and car bombs don't strike daily in Iraq anymore. People are venturing out at night. But that doesn't mean voters are satisfied with their leaders. In fact, ask them to list their most important issues in local elections Saturday, and security takes a back seat to basic services, the economy and culture, if interviews with more than 20 Iraqis across the country are anything to go on.

Abu Mujahid brags that he bombed a U.S. Army Humvee and wounded two American soldiers just last month. Now he's stumping for Sunni candidates and talking matter-of-factly about the importance of safety as Iraqis head to the polls today. "This is something like a truce so the elections will be implemented in a secure environment," said Abu Mujahid, an active member of the 1920 Revolution Brigades, an armed Sunni Arab group.

Poor planning, weak oversight and greed combined to soak U.S. taxpayers and undermine American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, government watchdogs tell a new commission examining waste and corruption in wartime contracts. Since 2003, the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development have paid contractors more than $100 billion for goods and services to support war operations and rebuilding.

Army Sgt. Michael Kyle Clark put his young son and family above everything but service to his country. Clark, 24, probably could have avoided his second tour in Iraq. Just after Thanksgiving in 2006, shortly after coming home from his first deployment, he shattered his pelvis while horsing around with buddies on his Yamaha motorcycle. "We thought we were going to lose him," recalled his wife, Nalini. "Then we thought he would never walk."

A female suicide bomber who infiltrated a crowd of Shiite Muslim women and children making their pilgrimage to the holy city of Karbala left 35 dead and 80 wounded Friday in the deadliest attack in Iraq this year, officials said. The bombing occurred in Musayyib, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, at a roadside rest area that served cake, tea and water to women and children, authorities said. The incident marked the third day in a row that Shiite pilgrims were attacked.

Lance Cpl. Daryl Crookston knew there would be casualties. That inevitability had been drummed into him as far back as boot camp, by drill sergeants and infantry school instructors, by fellow Marines. But when two Marine buddies went down on a combat patrol in the flat scrub desert of western Afghanistan, it was so shocking that Crookston felt overwhelmed. One minute the two men were alive, and in an instant they were dead.