Members of a civilian family traveling in an automobile were injured by Iraqi forces' gunfire near an Iraqi checkpoint in the al-Hawija district west of Kirkuk after the family did not respond to instructions to stop at the checkpoint.

The incident occurred at an Iraqi National Guard installation on the main road...

According to al-Jazeera and Elaph, the truce agreement signed last week to end the battles in Sadr City may have finally entered into effect. While street-level information from the besieged Sadr City (and Basra, and Mosul) have been scarce in the last weeks due to a series of government campaigns, papers reported – as late as yesterday - that the Maliki-Sadr truce was still not unanimously accepted by the Mahdi Army commanders, and that the Iraqi and US forces were yet to enter Sadr City’s inner neighborhoods, still under the control of Mahdi Army militiamen.

Today, Elaph announced that the Iraqi government forces were finally able to enter the Shi’a district , in an indication that Mahdi fighters may have complied with their leadership’s decision to lay down weapons and avoid military confrontations with the US and Iraqi government forces.

The truce, however, is not engendering an overture...

As thousands of Iraqis flee Iraq each day, most often by highways to Jordan or Syria, they face death even on the roads. I met with three Iraqi taxi drivers in downtown Amman, Jordan as they were resting between jobs. One driver, a Shia from Diwaniya, had been working the same route since 1997.

He and his two friends laughed when I asked them how...

The latest jokes making the rounds among Iraqis in Baghdad:

-- Talabani's (the Iraqi president's) wife calls her husband in the middle of a cabinet meeting and says, "Come home! Thieves are breaking into the house." Talabani replies that she must be mistaken, "All the thieves are right here in front of me."

-- An Iraqi guy has a new girlfriend and...

Snapped earlier this week, these exclusive photos capture scenes from the Dora neighborhood in southern Baghdad. Until recently, Dora was known as a militant stronghold, a dangerous no-go area under the control of Sunni extremists.

The first set of photos below shows a major market in Dora. Local sources explain that this market just...

Japan leads the international community as the nation--other than the US--that has pledged the most money for the reconstruction of...