Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's wife, Hero Ibrahim Ahmed, escaped a roadside bomb attack in the heart of Baghdad on Sunday that wounded her four bodyguards, officials said.
The First Lady escaped unhurt as her convoy was hit by a roadside bomb while on her way to the National Theatre in central Baghdad's Karrada district where she was to attend a cultural programme, Talabani's office said in a statement. Her four bodyguards were wounded, officials said, adding that it appeared to be an indiscriminate attack in the tightly-guarded capital.
Ahmed is a daughter of well-known political activist Ibrahim Ahmed who was one of the founders of the Kurdish Democratic Party, a leading political group in northern Iraq. Born in 1948, she graduated from Baghdad University and joined the peshmerga forces with Talabani whom she married in 1970. She is now a businesswoman, owns a media group called Kakh, and is a children's rights activist.
Meanwhile, the US military said its troops killed 13 Shiite fighters in overnight clashes in Baghdad's Sadr City, the stronghold of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The overnight clashes saw the military use tanks and air support in a series of exchanges with the militiamen in the district that is home to some two million Shiites.
The military also reported on Sunday the deaths of four US marines in a roadside bombing in western Iraq's Anbar province on Friday, marking one of the deadliest attacks in months against them in the former Sunni rebel bastion.
The latest Anbar attack brought to 1,290 the US military's losses in the province since the March 2003 invasion, according to independent website www.icasualties.org, closely trailing the 1,298 killed in the capital Baghdad. Most of the US deaths in Anbar, the biggest province in Iraq, have been caused by roadside bombs.
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