Jaafari Appointed Prime Minister
Jalal Talabani appears to have had a senior moment of some magnitude. In the course of announcing that Ibrahim Jaafari will be Iraq’s new prime minister, he says he suffered a memory lapse and had to leave the podium so an aide could remind him of Jaafari’s name. The superstitious took it as an ill omen.
Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Jaafari pledged to make headway on Iraq’s poor security, and that he sharply criticized the outgoing government of Iyad Allawi for letting Baathists serve in the security and intelligence forces. Jaafari appears set to purge them.
The same newspaper says that 10 Iraqis were killed in separate incidents in the ongoing guerrilla war on Thursday, and another 11 corpses were discovered near Ramadi (usually these turn out to be police or police recruits).