12 killed in Iraq attacks

Insurgents killed a dozen Iraqi police and soldiers today during attacks in a province north of Baghdad, officials said.

United States and Iraq troops clashed with insurgents near the northern city of Tal Afar in another incident.

The fighting occurred as discreet talks were under way to refine language in the draft constitution to ease Sunni Arab hostility and mollify Iraq’s Arab neighbours who fear the charter will loosen the country’s ties to the Arab world, officials said.

Nine policemen died in a pair of shoot-outs in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

Three Iraqi soldiers were killed when their convoy was attacked by gunmen near Adhaim, 30 miles north of Baqouba.

Iraqi civilians reported fighting late on Friday in the outskirts of Tal Afar, an ethnically mixed insurgent stronghold 260 miles northwest of Baghdad.

Hospital officials said they were unsure of casualties because it was too dangerous for ambulances to reach the area. US armoured vehicles could be seen in the hills outside the city, the Iraqis said.

Iraqi police also clashed with insurgents late Friday at the Tal Afar bus station after receiving reports that rebels were storing weapons there. One insurgent was killed and six others were arrested.

In Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, four civilians were killed and 11 injured when three mortar shells fired at a US installation missed the target and landed in a residential area, police said.

US and Iraqi officials had hoped that a new constitution, finalised last month after weeks of intense negotiations, would help bring Iraq’s factions together and in time lure Sunni Arabs away from the Sunni-dominated insurgency.

The bitter talks appeared instead to sharpen communal tensions, at a time when both Sunnis and Shiites accused extremists from the other community of killing their civilians.

In Kufa, radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr suggested that sectarian war may already have begun in Iraq.

“We condemn the view that the (US-led) occupation’s existence is beneficial for the Iraqi people because if it ended, there would be sectarian war – as if sectarian war has not already begun,” al-Sadr said in a sermon on Friday.

Although talks on substantive issues have ended, discreet contacts are still going on to tinker with language in hopes of making the document more palatable to the Sunnis in the October 15 referendum.