Iraq’s parliament convened for a special meeting Friday to send a “clear message” of its strength and solidarity to insurgent groups after Thursday’s fatal bombing in a government cafeteria. An al-Qaida-affiliated alliance called the Islamic State in Iraq has claimed it carried out the attack and sent its own message–via suicide bomber–that the surge isn’t making Baghdad more secure.


BBC:

The Islamic State in Iraq – which includes a number of Sunni insurgent movements – said it carried out the attacks in a statement posted on an Islamist website.

“A knight from the state of Islam… reached the heart of the Green Zone” and exposed the lies about the security surge in Baghdad, the statement said.

It is impossible to say whether the claim is genuine but one institute which monitors militant websites believes that it is, says the BBC’s Jonathan Charles in Baghdad.

It is also the sort of headline-grabbing attack carried out by the organisation in the past, our correspondent adds.

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Click here to watch Washington Post journalist Sudarsan Raghavan’s eyewitness report of the bombing, posted on MSNBC.com

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