Far From Being Over

It’s been a rough week in Iraq…

Efforts to stabilize that country have been largely successful over the past months but, over the past several days, attacks within that nation have stepped up. BBC News Has details…

 

A suicide bomber in Iraq’s Anbar province has attacked an army base, injuring 26 people, officials say.

The attack took place in the town of Habania, 25km (15 miles) east of the provincial capital, Ramadi.

The defence ministry told the BBC there were no fatalities from the attack, contradicting earlier reports that 16 people had been killed.

Despite a string of recent bombings, US military officials say the country is much more stable than two years ago.

The base in Habania is shared by the Iraqi military and US forces, Associated Press news agency said.

It is not yet clear if any US troops were caught in the attack.

There has been a series of deadly bombings across Iraq in recent months, but in March, a spokesman for the US-led Multi-National Forces in Iraq said the country had moved “from a very unstable to a stable position”.

Eleven police assigned to protect oil installations in northern Iraq were killed on Wednesday by a car bomb as they travelled in a convoy in Kirkuk.

A suicide bomber attacked a US-allied Sunni militia group south of Baghdad on Saturday while they were waiting to collect their pay at an army post in Iskandariya.

Such local “Awakening” councils have been credited with restoring relative calm to much of Iraq, including Anbar province, an al-Qaeda stronghold after the US-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein in 2003.