Hints and tips:
...The US embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment....
...Hundreds of demonstrators in Baghdad stormed the Swedish embassy and set it alight on Thursday, amid tensions over the burning of a Koran and a planned demonstration in Stockholm....
...The UN vote in New York came a day after seven mortar rounds landed in the US embassy compound in Baghdad, Iraq, again raising fears that the conflict in Gaza could widen in the region....
...Moqtada al-Sadr, the powerful Shia cleric, has also called for the US embassy in Baghdad to be closed down....
...Sweden’s foreign minister Tobias Billström said all the embassy staff were safe, but condemned Iraq for “seriously failing” in its responsibility to protect the embassy and its personnel, calling the attacks...
...“There is no doubt that yesterday’s attack was very unusual due to the seniority of the commander who was targeted and the proximity to the Iranian embassy in Damascus....
...Iran was able to exploit the turmoil as Iraq’s Shia majority, many with links to Tehran, rose to power in Baghdad....
...Thursday’s vote was the fourth attempt to elect a president this year and took place shortly after a volley of nine rockets hit the capital’s green zone, which houses government buildings and foreign embassies...
...At least 30 people were killed in Baghdad after followers of an influential Shia cleric stormed a government complex and clashed with militia groups tied to his rivals as chaos gripped Iraq’s capital....
...They broke through the concrete barriers of the heavily fortified green zone, which houses the parliament, many foreign embassies and government buildings....
...The unrest on Wednesday in Baghdad’s Green Zone, home to government buildings and foreign embassies, underscored the worsening political turmoil in Iraq....
...“We have no electricity, no water and my bread has tripled in price this year,” said Ahmed Youssef, a 35-year-old barber in Baghdad....
...The protests took place on the day Iraq marked its longest period without a government following elections, and was the latest symptom of a deepening crisis in Baghdad — arguably the worst since the country...
...And so we saw that: post-US invasion of Iraq with the flow of jihadis coming from Syria into Iraq, which fed into the insurgency against the Americans....
...The announcement formalises Biden’s U-turn on Saudi Arabia, which he deemed a pariah state while campaigning for the presidency following the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents....
...There at Awkar, the US is building the second largest embassy in the world (after Baghdad)....
...and embassies, claiming electoral fraud....
...In 2016, his supporters stormed the Green Zone — a walled off square-mile in central Baghdad housing embassies and Iraq’s parliament — and roughed up lawmakers....
...President George HW Bush took the view that the mandate of the multinational force was to liberate Kuwait, not to march on to Baghdad and unseat Saddam....
...have Iraq’s best interest in mind.”...
...The foreign ministers from the two nations, which cut diplomatic ties at the beginning of 2016, gathered at the conference in Baghdad that was ostensibly intended to rally support for Iraq....
...The US-led assault on Iraq came close to seeding these conditions for jihad....
...That pushed the US and the Islamic republic to the brink of war, with Iraq, which hosts about 2,500 American troops, a likely battlefield as Baghdad was squeezed between Washington and Tehran....
...The two cut ties in 2016 after the kingdom executed a senior Shia cleric and the Saudi embassy in Iran was ransacked....
...But sporadic attacks against American targets have continued, including rockets fired at the US embassy in Baghdad in December, as the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran ramped...
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