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Sixteen protesters killed in Baghdad fighting

SIXTEEN protesters have been killed in the latest round of street battles in Baghdad’s historic Rasheed Street, which continued today.

The killings bring the death toll from Iraq’s nearly two months of protests to over 340.

Security forces have fired live ammunition into crowds demonstrating against corruption and the country’s sectarian political system. Across the country’s south, protesters blocked roads and burned tyres.

The Iraqi Communist Party warned that “procrastination and delay” by the government was intensifying the crisis and called again for its resignation and the immediate concession of protesters’ demands. The “intifada” was “an unprecedented popular referendum,” it declared.

US Vice-President Mike Pence embarked on an impromptu visit to Iraqi Kurdistan and called for the central government to show “restraint.” He met with Iraqi Kurdish leaders to inform them that the US withdrawal of troops from northern Syria to facilitate a Turkish invasion had not been a breach of the alliance with Syrian Kurds, who understood that the US commitment to protect them was “unchanging.”

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