girl is mass stoned to death in a lynching captured on cellphone cameras in Bashiqa, Ninawa for converting to Islam to marry a Sunni boy. April 11 – In April, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that all active-duty Army soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan will serve for sixteen months, instead of the twelve month tours they expected. "Without this action, we would have had to deploy five Army active-duty brigades sooner than the 12-month at-home goal", Gates said. Statistics released in April indicated that more and more soldiers have been deserting their duty, a sharp rise from the years before. April 12 – Suicide truck bombs destroyed the al-Sarafiya bridge over the Tigris River, killing at least 10. The bridge was reportedly over 75 years old and constructed by the British. A suicide bomber detonated a bomb inside a cafeteria outside the Iraqi Parliament chamber, killing one member of Parliament (down from eight killed, including three members of Parliament, as previously reported), and wounding 22 in the 2007 Iraqi Parliament Bombing. Seven of the wounded were members of Parliament. The building where the bombing occurred was inside the heavily fortified Green Zone. April 14 – Insurgents detonated a car bomb inside at a bus station in Karbala, killing at least 37 and wounding more than 150. A bomb detonated on a bridge in Baghdad spanning the Tigris River, killing 10, the second in two days. The bridge was only slightly damaged. April 16 – Moqtada al-Sadr's Parliament bloc resigns again in protest of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's refusal to set a timetable for US troop withdrawal. April 18 – Four bombings occur in Baghdad, killing at least 198 in the April 18, 2007 Baghdad bombings. May May 6 – Roadside bombs killed eight American soldiers in separate attacks in Diyala province and Baghdad as sectarian tension rises. In all, at least 95 Iraqis were killed or found dead nationwide. May 8 – More than half of the members of Iraq's parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country for the first time. 144 of the 275 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition that would require the Iraqi government to seek approval from parliament before it requests an extension of the U.N. mandate for foreign forces to be in Iraq expiring at the end of 2007. It also calls for a timetable for the troop withdrawal and a freeze on