BAGHDAD, 5 May 2008 — Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s wife, Hero Ibrahim Ahmad, escaped a roadside bomb attack in the heart of Baghdad yesterday that wounded her four bodyguards, officials said.
The first lady escaped unhurt as her convoy was hit by a roadside bomb while on her way to the National Theater in central Baghdad’s Karrada district where she was to attend a cultural program, Talabani’s office said in a statement.
Her four bodyguards were wounded, officials said, adding that it appeared to be a coordinated attack in the increasingly insecure capital.
Hero is a daughter of well-known political activist Ibrahim Ahmad who was one of the founders of the Kurdish Democratic Party, a leading political group in northern Iraq.
Born in 1948, she graduated from Baghdad University and joined the Peshmerga forces with Talabani whom she married in 1970. She is now a businesswoman, owns a media group called Kakh, and is a children’s rights activist.
Meanwhile, the US military said its troops killed 13 fighters in overnight clashes in Baghdad’s Sadr City, the stronghold of anti-occupation cleric Moqtada Sadr. The overnight clashes saw the military use tanks and air support in a series of exchanges with the militiamen in the district that is home to some two million Iraqis.
The military reported yesterday the deaths of four US Marines in a roadside bombing in western Iraq’s Anbar province on Friday, marking one of the deadliest attacks in months against them in the former insurgent bastion.
The latest Anbar attack brought to 1,290 the US military’s losses in the province since the March 2003 invasion, according to independent website www.icasualties.org, closely trailing the 1,298 killed in the capital Baghdad.
Most of the US deaths in Anbar, the biggest province in Iraq, have been caused by roadside bombs. The losses in Anbar make up nearly a third of the 4,071 US troops killed in the conflict so far.
The vast desert province was a key stronghold of the anti-US insurgency in the first years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Calm returned to the province, however, after local tribal chiefs sided with the military in fighting Al-Qaeda militants since late 2006.
The Iraqi government, meanwhile, said yesterday that it had no evidence to link Iranian support for militiamen leading attacks in Sadr City and called for better relations with Tehran.
On US accusations that weapons captured from Sadr City fighters bore 2008 markings suggesting Iranian involvement, government spokesman Ali Dabbagh said: “We don’t have that kind of evidence... If there is hard evidence, we will defend the country.”
In the main northern city of Mosul, an Iraqi woman freelance journalist was killed yesterday, said police and the Journalists Freedom Observatory (JFO), a local media watchdog.
Gunmen dragged Sarwat Abdul Wahab, 30, from a taxi and killed her in broad daylight. Around 235 media staff have been killed in Iraq since the invasion, according to the JFO, making the country the most dangerous in the world from which to report.
