Cairo - Arab League Chief Amr Mussa appointed retired diplomat Hani Khalaf, an Egyptian national, to head the Arab League representation in Iraq, an Arab League statement said Thursday.

The new Arab League ambassador will fly to Baghdad in October, the statement said.

The Arab League office in Baghdad was previously headed by a Morrocan, Mukhtar Yemeni, who resigned in the summer of 2007 over the security conditions in the country. Since then the post has been vacant.

Egypt for its part has not sent a top diplomats to Iraq since the killing of its ambassador there, Ihab al-Sherif, in July 2005, five days after he was kidnapped in Baghdad.

Cairo still has no ambassador in the war-torn country.

Washington - The top leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq has left the country for Afghanistan, the Washington Post reported Thursday, citing named sources in both the Sunni militant group and the Iraqi military.

The report quoted the group's local leader in Fallujah, Abdullah al-Ansari, as saying in an interview with a Washington Post special correspondent that the group's national leader since 2006, an Egyptian known by the aliases Abu Hamza al-Muhajer or Abu Ayyub al- Masri, had departed Iraq and was now in Afghanistan, having transited through Iran. It was "not known yet" if his departure was permanent.

Baghdad - For a second day Wednesday Iraqi troops backed by US forces continued a major offensive against the al-Qaeda terrorist network in the restive Diyala province.

The Iraqi government has sent some 30,000 army and police forces to the province since it announced its plan to launch the assault weeks ago.

The offensive was launched mainly by Iraqi troops, according to the US military.

Baghdad - Hundreds of Iraq's politically assertive Kurds protested in the northern Kurdish capital of Sulaymanyah over a provincial election law passed by parliament last week, security sources said Wednesday.

The Kurdish protestors gathered in various places across the northern Sulaymanyah province.

The last two days have witnessed similar protests in the northern provinces of Arbil and Kirkuk.

During the Kurdish protest in Kirkuk Monday 22 people were killed and 150 injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up amongst the protestors.

Bagdad - At least one million Shiites gathered on Tuesday around the golden dome shrine commemorating a prominent Shiite religious figure in the Iraqi capital Baghdad.

The shrine is to Imam Mussa al-Khadim, whom Shiites regard as a saint. Faithful religious Shiites gather in the sacred shrine and perform rituals of beating their heads with their hands and dancing in circles.

The number of visitors reached its peak on Tuesday. Thousands of Iraqi forces along with US reinforcements were deployed in the area amid heightened security as Kazimiyah was the site of previous attacks on pilgrims.

Baghdad - Authorities in Iraq's restive Diyala province imposed on Tuesday a total curfew as part of preparations for a major military operation to root out insurgents from the al-Qaeda terrorist network, according to security sources.

A curfew was enforced in the early hours on Tuesday due to the launch of a military operation by Iraqi and US forces to track down fighters, especially those belonging to al-Qaeda, a media official from the ground troops in Diyala told the Voices of Iraq news agency.

No further details were immediately available.