BAGHDAD, Feb. 9 -- Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Salam Z. al-Zobaee's cousin has been in government custody for eight months.

Last week, the CIA sent an urgent report to President Bush's National Security Council: Iranian authorities had arrested two al-Qaeda operatives traveling through Iran on their way from Pakistan to Iraq. The suspects were caught along a well-worn, if little-noticed, route for militants determined to fight U.S. troops on Iraqi soil, according to a senior intelligence official....

BAGHDAD, Feb. 9 -- U.S. forces killed eight Kurdish soldiers and wounded nine others at an established checkpoint in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Friday, Kurdish officials said.

Senate Democrats and Republicans disagreed yesterday over the meaning and importance of a Defense Department inspector general's conclusion that a Pentagon policy office produced and gave senior policymakers "alternative intelligence assessments on Iraq and Al Qaida relations" that were "inconsistent" with the intelligence community's consensus view in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq....

A federal appeals court in Washington ruled yesterday that a U.S. citizen in U.S. military custody in Iraq has the right to challenge his detention in a federal court.

The deal to create a Palestinian national unity government, announced Thursday in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, threatens to expose divisions between the United States and its European allies while complicating Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's peace mission later this month, diplomats and analysts said...

JERUSALEM, Feb. 9 -- Palestinians clashed with Israeli police Friday at one of this city's holiest sites and demonstrated across the West Bank to protest a construction project Israel has begun here near a pair of venerated mosques.