Iraq Watch: July 15, 2006

Iraqi Olympic Committee Chair Abducted

Dozens of gunmen dressed in Iraqi military fatigues swooped into an Iraqi National Olympic Committee (INOC) meeting in central Baghdad, seizing its chairman, Ahmed al-Hijiya, along with at last 30 others.

Two security guards were killed during Saturday's mass abduction.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the ambush although the early-afternoon raid appeared to be carefully planned, taking only minutes to execute.

Although al-Hijiya is a Sunni, the New York Times reports that those abducted represented a wide spectrum of Iraqi sects decreasing the likelihood that the attack was purely sectarian in nature.

In other violence Saturday, a roadside bomb exploded outside a southern Baghdad supermarket killing six people and wounding 11 more.

A suicide car bomber in eastern Baghdad, meanwhile, killed two Iraqi security forces and injured four.

Militants shot to death two Iraqi soldiers along with a civilian just south of the Baqouba, a restive town situated noth of Baghdad.

In the northern, oil-rich city of Kirkuk, a bomb – hidden in a computer – detonated inside an Internet cafe leaving one person dead and two others wounded.

Also, the U.S. military announced the deaths of two U.S. service members. Both soldiers were killed Saturday by roadside bombs in the vicinity of Baghdad.