Iraqi police said that 17 people were killed in five terrorist car bomb blasts rocked many areas in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. An international counterterrorism conference is scheduled to be held in Baghdad on March 12 and 13 with a wide participation by international and Arab countries and the presence of the UN, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Earlier, Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, called many times for holding an international conference to combat terrorism and cited the attempts of al-Qaeda to exploit chaos in the Arab world to impose its agenda.