Mass grave found north of Baghdad

By Michael Holden and Paul Tait

Police and members of a neighbourhood security unit raided a house thought to be used by Sunni Islamist al Qaeda in an area near Samarra, 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, when they found 10 people who had been kidnapped from a nearby town.

Local families had identified some of those buried in the grave but little other information was available, police said. Three car bombs were also found in the area.

In another symbolic move, the government said it had started to rebuild a revered Shi'ite shrine in Samarra which was bombed two years ago, sparking sectarian violence which killed tens of thousands and took Iraq to the brink of civil war.

Iraq's Kurdish minority has long demanded a new flag, saying the old banner was a reminder of Saddam Hussein's brutality.

Kurdish officials had refused to fly the old flag, introduced after the coup by Saddam's Baath party in 1963, and it was banned in largely autonomous northern Kurdistan.

But many ordinary Iraqis saw the old flag as having little to do with Saddam, a Sunni Arab, and would prefer the government focused on issues such as improving basic services like electricity and water, which still run only intermittently.

HEAL WOUNDS

That bombing toppled the mosque's famed golden dome and unleashed savage sectarian fighting between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Muslims.

Attacks across Iraq have fallen 60 percent since last June, with the growth of the mainly Sunni Arab neighbourhood police units and 30,000 extra U.S. troops credited for sharply falling violence.

The U.S. military said a civilian woman had been killed on Tuesday during a raid by its troops against al Qaeda suspects, the day after it admitted accidentally killing nine civilians.

The killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. soldiers has long put a strain on relations between Baghdad and Washington. The U.S. military says militants often deliberately use civilians as shields against attacking U.S. forces.

Six suspected al Qaeda fighters were killed in other raids near Khalis, another town north of Baghdad, the military said.