70 kg of TNT seized near Makhmour

ARBIL, Sept. 20 (Iraqi News) – A force from the Iraqi army’s 7th Brigade seized a large amount of highly explosive TNT and defused an improvised explosive device (IED) on the road linking al-Kiyara area to Makhmour district, an army source said on Saturday. “The IED was defused near the village of Makkuk, (40 km) west of Makhmour,” the source, who preferred not to be named, told IraqiNews.com – Voices of Iraq – (Iraqi News). “No one was arrested on charges of possession of explosives,” the military source pointed out. Makhmour, 68 km southwest of Arbil, is one of the districts administratively disputed by Arbil, 349 km northeast of Baghdad, and Ninewa, 405 km northeast of the Iraqi capital. Arbil, also written Erbil or Irbil, is believed to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited in the world and is one of the largest cities in Iraq. The city lies eighty kilometers (fifty miles) east of Mosul. In 2005, its estimated population was 990,000 inhabitants. The city is the capital of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region and the Kurdistan Regional Government Kurdistan RegionG). Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, only isolated, sporadic violence has hit Arbil, unlike many other areas of Iraq. AmR (S)/SR 1