Iraqi Police

Radical cleric Muqtada Sadr reminded his followers Friday to observe a truce that has been nearing collapse, pulling back from a showdown against fellow Shiite Muslims in the government. In a statement read in mosques during Friday prayers, Sadr said his recent threat of "open war" was aimed only at U.S.-led forces and he urged his followers not to fight Iraqi troops.

Sunni militants on Tuesday launched deadly attacks around Iraq, where a suicide truck bomb killed two U.S. Marines and 10 Iraqis in Anbar province, a female bomber struck a police station in eastern Iraq and a car bomb exploded in this capital city near a well-known restaurant. Confrontations once more jolted Sadr City, the Shiite Muslim district in Baghdad where the U.S. military said its forces fired a Hellfire missile that hit a car carrying militants and rockets.

Four U.S. soldiers were killed when a bomb hit their vehicle in south Baghdad late Sunday, bringing the number of U.S. service members killed in the Iraq war to 4,000. The grim milestone came at a time when attacks against the U.S. military are ebbing and officials have claimed significant progress against Iraq's deadly insurgency and sectarian violence. It was reached about 10 p.m. on a day when more than 60 Iraqis were killed and dozens injured in attacks in Baghdad and north of the capital.

Iraq's presidential council dropped its objections Wednesday to a law that helps clear the way for provincial elections that are considered key to reconciling the country's ethnic and religious factions. The unexpected announcement by the council, made up of the country's president and two vice presidents, follows intense lobbying by U.S. officials to make the power-sharing compromises needed to solidify a recent drop in violence. U.S.

Mystery and dread shrouded a freshly discovered mass grave site filled with the remains of at least 50 and perhaps as many as 100 people, some of them children, in a river valley north of here. Iraqi police announced the find Saturday after stumbling upon the badly decomposed bodies during a raid a day earlier. The dead were buried near the town of Khalis, in one of the many fruit, date and palm orchards that line the Diyala River, just north of the provincial capital of Baqubah. Iraqis long associated mass graves with the atrocities of former President Saddam Hussein's regime, including large-scale executions of Kurdish and Shiite Muslim civilians suspected of sympathizing with anti-government rebels in the 1980s and 1990s.

Iraqi police officers attempting to dismantle rockets primed for launching from the back of a truck were caught up in a series of blasts Tuesday that killed at least 13 of them. There were different reports on what caused the explosions in eastern Baghdad. An official in the Ministry of Interior, which oversees police, said the area around the truck had been booby-trapped with roadside bombs that detonated as police arrived.

The target was in the house. U.S. forces made their move. But as they neared the building in a lush farming area south of Baghdad, gunmen emerged from the dark. When the shooting ended, two U.S.-allied civilian security guards were dead, along with a companion apparently linked to the security force. The U.S. Army said Sunday it appeared that the Iraqi men had left their assigned checkpoint in the village of Jarf Sakhr and were mistaken for insurgents. But it was the second case in a week of U.

In a pageant filled with poetry, song, political speeches and a display of the Iraqi security forces' increased firepower, the U.S. Marines on Thursday turned over major responsibility for protecting this Euphrates River valley town to the Iraqi army and police. It was the second such turnover in recent weeks in the western province of Anbar, once a major battleground with Sunni Arab insurgents, with more expected, Marine officials said.

The 26-year-old Sunni Arab man sat in the restaurant of a fashionable Baghdad hotel, his business suit covering marks where he said a power drill had penetrated his thigh and acid dissolved his calf. The former Iraqi SWAT commander had traveled to Baghdad for meetings with Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and other high-ranking officials in which he plans to provide an account of torture he says he endured on the orders of Maj. Gen. Ghanim Quraishi, the Shiite Muslim police chief of Diyala province.

A Western journalist and his Iraqi interpreter working for CBS News were missing Monday after being abducted outside their hotel in the southern city of Basra, Iraqi police said. According to an Iraqi police report, the two had been missing since Sunday evening. It said eight SUVs arrived at their hotel earlier in the day and their occupants asked to see the guest list. Later, when the journalists left the hotel, two SUVs were waiting for them and took them away, the police report said.