No doubts over Iraqi parliament

A top Shiite politicians today said names of selections for top posts in the new Iraqi government must be agreed upon before parliament can convene next week, casting doubt on whether the legislature will meet as announced.

In continuing violence, officials reported that at least 34 people were killed - including a US soldier and 13 people in a car bombing near a vegetable market in north-west Baghdad.

The next session was called for Monday to push past a long-standing political stalemate over who should be the country’s next prime minister. But members of the dominant Shiite alliance questioned the purpose of holding the meeting without first designating all top posts.

“If we don’t agree on the key posts, then why should we go to parliament?” Khudayer al-Khuzai asked.

The move indicated that the Shiites don’t want to be steamrolled into an assembly meeting until they’ve internally resolved the issue of the prime minister nomination.

The alliance has so far stood behind its candidate, current Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, but cracks in support have begun to show. Sunnis and Kurds have refused to accept the nominee.

Pressure was on the Shiites to pick a new candidate ahead of next week’s assembly meeting, called by acting parliament speaker Adnan Pachachi yesterday to break the deadlock.

Demanding that all the top government positions be determined first, however, in turn puts pressure on the Sunnis and Kurds, whose leaders will be up for such posts.

Al-Khuzai said Shiite politicians were asking for representatives of each political bloc to meet on Sunday to discuss names for the key positions, which include the president, the parliament speaker and deputies, among others.

If names can be agreed upon Sunday, then Shiite leaders will attend the Monday meeting, he said.

Iraqi voters chose the 275-member assembly on Dec. 15, but the legislature met briefly only once last month.

The lack of political progress has frustrated Iraqis, especially as steady violence – much of it sectarian – continues to claim hundreds of lives and threaten to push the country into a large-scale civil war.

Politicians echoed the discontent, chastising the top leaders’ failure to reach agreement.

“There are some political blocs who’d rather just be in power than provide security to the people,” Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni politician, told a news conference. “We demand the political entities speed up the formation of the national government and stop the bloodshed in Iraq.”

Al-Mutlaq, who is head of the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue, said the Shiite alliance should stop insisting on al-Jaafari and choose another candidate with broader support. The Sunni leader threatened to abandon the political process if the conflict wasn’t resolved soon.

The lack of political stability has helped fuel the chaos in the streets, where bombings, kidnappings and drive-by shootings are daily occurrences.

Sectarian tensions have been running high ever since the February 22 bombing of an important Shiite shrine in Samarra, which prompted retaliatory killings and more mosque attacks.

The car bombing near the vegetable market hit Baghdad’s mostly Shiite neighbourhood of Shula, killing 13 people and wounding at least eight. Another car bomb exploded in Shula on April 5, wounding 13 people.

In the southern city of Basra, gunmen stormed the house of a Sunni family and killed seven people – a father, five of his sons, and another relative, police said.

A navy officer and his friend were killed by drive-by shooters while walking downtown in the same city.

Police found the bodies of two men who had just been kidnapped – an engineer, and a translator working with British troops in the area. Another engineer abducted Thursday was still missing, police said.

Gunmen killed the brother of one of Iraq’s most prominent Sunni Arab politicians, Iraqi Islamic Party leader Tariq al-Hashimi, a party official said. The brother, Mahmoud al-Hashimi, was driving with a friend in eastern Baghdad when gunmen opened fire, killing them both, police said.

Attacks targeting government employees also appeared to be on the rise in Baghdad.

A Foreign Ministry worker was kidnapped and a Health Ministry laborer wounded in a shooting that killed her driver. A Housing Ministry employee was also wounded, in a drive-by shooting, police said. The attacks came a day after three government employees were killed in the capital.

“These are well-known tactics adopted by the insurgents when they are unable to send car bombs to the capital,” police Lieutenant Colonel Ali Rashid said.

“They resort to small, separate attacks on unarmed government employees in order to keep people frightened.”

In Baghdad’s southern district of Dora, a bystander was killed in a gunfight between assailants and Iraqi police and gunmen shot down a power plant employee as he was leaving work, police said.

A soldier wearing civilian clothes was gunned down near his home in the same neighbourhood, where police also discovered a body, shot in the head, police said.

Police found four other corpses in different areas of northern and western Baghdad.

In the northern city of Mosul, gunmen killed a policeman who was driving his sons to school. One of the sons was also killed and the other seriously wounded, police said. In southern Iraq, the body of a barber kidnapped four days earlier was found in the city of Basra, police said.

A roadside bomb killed a US soldier south-west of Baghdad, the US military said. The exact location was not given, and no name was released. More American troops have died in the first two weeks of April than in the entire month of March, according to an Associated Press count.

An Iraqi police commando was also killed in a roadside bombing, about 20 miles south of Baghdad in Mahmoudiya.

A car bomb threat in the city of Tikrit north of Baghdad prompted a curfew, imposed this morning until further notice, police said.

Also last night, gunmen near Taji, an air base about 12 miles north of Baghdad, ambushed three trucks carrying mobile health clinics belonging to the Interior Ministry. They killed two drivers and six policemen who were escorting the convoy, police said.

Two Iraqi contractors who supply the army with food were killed by gunmen who stopped their car last night about 28 miles south of the northern city of Kirkuk.