Two attacks in Baghdad kill at least 30

Suspected insurgents set off a car bomb to stop a minibus carrying Shiite government employees in Baghdad, then shot and killed 15 of them, the Iraqi government said.

In another attack in the capital today, two car bombs exploded in a commercial district, killing 15 other Iraqis, police said.

The US command said an insurgent attack on an American military patrol in Baghdad yesterday killed one soldier and wounded five. Another US serviceman also died in southern Iraq that day in an accident involving his vehicle.

Their deaths came after a weekend during which 13 American service members died in Iraq, including four whose Sea Knight helicopter plunged into a lake in volatile Anbar province on Sunday, the military said.

The US command has not named the four victims of the helicopter emergency landing, but the US Department of Defence identified one of them as Army Spc Dustin Adkins, 22, of Finger, Tennessee, who was assigned to the Group Support Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group, Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

In northern Baghdad this morning, gunmen set off a car bomb to intercept a minibus carrying employees of the Shiite Endowment, a government agency that cares for Shiite mosques in Iraq, to work, the organisation said.

The gunmen then opened fire on the workers, killing 15 of them and wounding seven, said Salah Abdul-Razzaq, an Endowment spokesman.

AP Television News footage of the aftermath showed shattered glass and shoes in the middle of the highway, with the burned-out hulk of the car that exploded on the side of the road.

A similar attack occurred late last month in southern Iraq against the Sunni Endowment, the government agency that cares for Sunni Arab mosques in Iraq.

On November 30, gunmen fired at a convoy carrying an official from that agency, killing him and three of his bodyguards, police said.

The attack, which also wounded two bodyguards, occurred in Basra, the largest city in mostly Shiite southern Iraq, a police spokesman said. Nasir Gatami, the official who died, was the deputy of the Sunni Endowment chapter in Basra. All the victims were Sunnis.

On November 15, suspected Shiite militiamen kidnapped three employees of the Sunni Endowment in Baghdad, the agency said.

At the time, Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al-Samaraie, the head of the Sunni Endowment, was quoted by Sunni-operated Baghdad Television as urging Prime Minister Nouri Maliki to work for the men’s release.

In another attack in the capital today, two car bombs exploded near one another in western Baghdad, killing at least 15 people and wounding 25, police said.

The explosions occurred at about 9.45am near a petrol station in Baiyaa, a commercial area of the capital with a mixed Sunni Arab and Shiite population, a policeman said.

Yesterday, insurgents attacked a US Army patrol in Baghdad as it was trying to control the movement of insurgents and enforce curfew restrictions in a north-eastern neighbourhood of the capital, the military said.

In southern Iraq, a 13th Sustainment Command (Expeditionary) soldier died yesterday when his M-1117 Armoured Security Vehicle rolled over north of Camp Adder, 200 miles south-west of Baghdad, the military said.

The deaths raised to at least 2,904 the number of members of the US military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

High numbers of US casualties and a recent spike in violence between Shiites and Sunnis have contributed to doubt in American about the Iraq war.

These concerns were considered a major factor in a recent election during which Democrats won control of both houses of the US congress from US President George Bush’s Republican party.

Bush told one of Iraq’s leading Shiite politicians, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, in a White House meeting yesterday that the US was not satisfied with progress in Iraq.

“I assured him that the US supports his work and the work of the prime minister to unify the country,” Bush said, referring to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.

”Part of unifying Iraq is for the elected leaders and society leaders to reject the extremists that are trying to stop the advance of this young democracy.”

The president is under pressure to draft a new blueprint for US involvement in Iraq.

A bipartisan commission, headed by James Baker III, former Republican secretary of state, and former Democratic representative Lee Hamilton of Indiana, is expected to present its recommendations to Bush tomorrow.

The group is expected to recommend gradually changing the mission of US troops in Iraq from combat to training and supporting Iraqi units, with a goal of withdrawing American combat troops by early 2008.