Germany has said it is prepared to arm Kurdish fighters battling Sunni insurgents in northern Iraq.

The European Union yesterday forged a unified response to the rapid advance of Islamic militants in Iraq and the resulting refugee crisis, allowing direct arms deliveries to Kurdish fighters battling the Sunni insurgents. Several EU nations pledged more humanitarian aid.

The European Union has sought to forge a unified response to the rapid advance of Islamic militants in Iraq and the resulting refugee crisis.

The scale of civic and social collapse across the Middle East, where societies, countries, and governments fall like autumn leaves, the escalating savagery of Islamic fundamentalists, their determined genocide against Christians, the helplessness of a world equally dumbfounded and disinterested and the never-ending conflict between Israelis and Palestinians are coming together in a way that appears to have an almost unstoppable momentum.

US Secretary of State John Kerry has urged Iraq’s top Shi’ite leaders to give more government power to political opponents before a Sunni insurgency seizes more control across the country and sweeps away hopes of lasting peace.

The new head of Syria’s main opposition group has called for mass defections from a regime struggling to survive by carrying out massacres, as the death toll in the uprising topped 14,000.

Yesterday’s commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland was a timely reminder of the evil that can emerge if sectarianism and religious bigotry is allowed to go unchecked. A total of one million Jewish people perished in the camp from 1942 until its liberation in 1945.

An Iraqi court has resumed hearing the case against Tariq Aziz and seven other former regime officials who face charges in the 1992 execution of dozens of merchants.

Saddam Hussein returned to court in Baghdad today for his genocide trial, two days after another Iraq panel convicted him of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to hang.

A verdict against Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants charged with crimes against humanity in connection with an anti-Shiite crackdown in the 1980s will be announced on November 5, a senior court official said today.

Iraqi security forces are on high alert in Baghdad and four other large provinces to try halt terror attacks ahead of today’s announcement of preliminary election results, police and military said.

Sunni Arab participation in the Iraqi elections could have been even higher if there had there been more polling centres in key Sunni areas, a head of the largest Sunni Arab slate said today.

GUNMEN assassinated an Iraqi woman member of parliament yesterday in a fresh shock to politicians whose failure to form a government three months after elections has allowed violence to thrive unchecked.

IRAQ’S deputy president Rowsch Shways said talks on a new government between the main Shi’ite alliance and Kurds would continue after parliament meets for the first time on Wednesday.

SADDAM HUSSEIN is living “like a king” in US military custody, an adviser to the Iraqi interim prime minister claims.

Iraqi officials struggled today to clear up confusion over whether the most wanted member of Saddam Hussein’s ousted dictatorship had been captured in a shoot-out north of Baghdad.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, ahead of a visit to Turkey today, said the European Union would start membership talks with the country if it met requirements on human rights and democracy by the end of the year, a newspaper reported in Ankara.

Two percussion bombs, which are loud but cause little damage, went off in front of two HSBC branches in Istanbul, shattering the bank windows.

One person was wounded when at least 10 rockets detonated in central Baghdad, near an area that houses the headquarters of the US-led coalition.

Iraqi politicians and a top Shiite cleric have successfully resolved their differences over the country’s interim constitution and will sign the charter tomorrow.

IRAQ took its first tentative steps toward democracy yesterday and they began with a boycott and demonstrations.

The job of rebuilding Iraq from its war-torn ruins begins today with the first of a series of meetings to shape an interim authority and a future government.

The United States and Turkey today agreed on an “early warning” system to avert friction between Ankara and Kurds of northern Iraq.

Iraqi Kurds claimed today that Saddam Hussein’s urbane mouthpiece Tariq Aziz has defected and is in the region they control in northern Iraq.