Flight IA237 landed at 11:08 pm (2208 GMT) Sunday after coming via Malmoe in Sweden on the 10-hour trip, according to arrival information on the airport's website.

After the flight departed Iraq, the country's civil aviation director Adnan Blebil told AFP: "I am happy. But if Western companies had been more cooperative, we could have started (flights to the West) several years earlier."

There were 30 foreign and Iraqi passengers on board the flight, including Transport Minister Amer Abduljabbar Ismail and Iraqi Airways chief Kifah Hassan.

"There will be two flights a week now. They will fly via Malmoe on the way out but the return flight will be direct," Blebil said.

The first flight since sanctions imposed by the UN after Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait came into effect had been scheduled to depart on April 16.

But Iceland's Eyjafjoell volcano erupted two days earlier, spewing out ash that forced air traffic authorities to cancel thousands of flights across Europe.

Much of Europe's airspace only reopened last week.

earlier related report
Qaeda in Iraq confirms top commanders killed
Baghdad (AFP) April 25, 2010 - Al-Qaeda in Iraq is struggling to recruit volunteers for suicide bombings and other attacks, the US army said on Sunday, hours after the jihadist network confirmed the deaths of its top commanders.

Brigadier General Ralph Baker, a senior officer in Baghdad, said no-one could deny that the killing of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayub al-Masri, who had direct links with Osama bin Laden, was a "decapitation" for its leadership.

The SITE Intelligence Group late on Saturday said the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), the Qaeda front in the country, had in a statement posted on jihadist Internet forums announced for the first time the deaths of the two men.

But the insurgents also vowed in the message that other insurgents would take their place, under plans put in place ahead of the Iraqi-US military strike that killed them in a house north of Baghdad on April 18.

Baker cautioned that the killing of AQI's previous military leader, the much better known Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who died in a US airstrike in 2006, had shown the insurgents were capable of rebuilding.

But he said AQI was weaker now than then, and it would be harder for it to regenerate after hundreds of arrests in recent months.

"When Zarqawi was killed, someone stepped up and took his place," Baker told reporters in Baghdad.

"This time we believe there are less charismatic and combat-proven leaders remaining in Al-Qaeda that can step up and resume that leadership role as effectively as has been accomplished in the past."

Since January, Iraqi intelligence and security services, with US support, have captured or arrested 404 Al-Qaeda members, according to Baker.

"Dozens of those AQI members have been mid- to upper-level leadership," he said.

"But it's just not the leadership that Al-Qaeda will have trouble finding replacements for. We know they are having great difficulties recruiting suicide bombers" because of better security on Iraq's border with Syria.

Although Iraq's government, US forces and Washington trumpeted the success of the joint operation that killed Baghdadi and Masri, a series of car bomb attacks in Baghdad on Friday killed 54 people and wounded 201.

Baker conceded that AQI was responsible, but argued that violence was falling overall, with security breaches down 40 percent since American combat troops left Iraq's cities, towns and villages last June.

"We do believe those (car bombs) are attributed to Al-Qaeda," he said. "It is very difficult to stop every attack in this city of seven million citizens."

In the Internet statement monitored by SITE, the ISI sharia (Islamic law) minister, Abu al-Walid Abd al-Wahhab al-Mashadani, said Baghdadi and Masri were attending a meeting when "enemy forces" engaged them and launched an airstrike.

The joint operation that targeted the main Al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq took place 10 kilometres (six miles) from Tikrit, the home city of executed dictator Saddam Hussein.

Mashadani praised Baghdadi and Masri and announced that other Islamist groups in Iraq had joined the ISI.

"Discussions had already begun with them before and after the initiative of Sheikh Abu Omar (al-Baghdadi)," he said.

"If Allah fated that the two sheikhs be killed at this particular time, know that they left a unique generation behind, one that was raised before their eyes," Mashadani added.

Baghdadi had been reported killed or captured at least three times before, and on those occasions Al-Qaeda issued denials, insisting he was still alive and free, making Saturday's confirmation all the more significant.

A close aide of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Sunday told state television the discovery of Baghdadi and Masri's hideout was a greater military achievement than the capture of Saddam by American forces in December 2003.

Yassin Majeed said an intelligence cell created by Maliki which last month caught Munaf Abdul Rahim al-Rawi, AQI's so-called "governor of Baghdad," led to the detention of a "postman" who carried messages to Baghdadi, which eventually culminated in last Sunday's operation that killed the top two AQI leaders.

"The next days will witness a new strike against Qaeda," Majeed added.

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