On Jan. 7, Al-Jazeera T.V. reported that in a terrorist attack by bombing, the head of the Awakening Council in Adhamiya neighborhood in northern Baghdad, Riyadh al- Samarrai along with ten others, mostly his bodyguards, were killed and 20 other people were wounded.

On Jan. 1, the commander of Awakening Council of Adhamiya in a press interview had announced that the Awakening Council under his command arrested a number of people with Iranian identification cards issued in Iran who were carrying arms and substantial amount of money.

Riyadh al-Samarrai also had said: “those people seemed to be involved in intelligence activities in Adhamiya. Their names were fake and one of them could not even speak Arabic. We handed them over to US forces.”