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Insurgents kill 16 in new round of attacks in Iraq

Guerrillas launched a series of attacks in Iraq yesterday, killing 16 people and wounding dozens more as the country took its first major step toward forming a government whose most crucial task will be dealing with the insurgency.

Most of the day's fatalities occurred in Baquba, 60km northeast of Baghdad.

Insurgents launched a series of apparently coordinated attacks in and around the city that killed seven soldiers and five police, said Tariq Ibrahim, a medic at Baquba's main hospital. He said at least 26 people were wounded, including one civilian caught in the crossfire.

The assaults included a car bomb, three roadside bombs and small arms attacks on three checkpoints, one of them just south of Baquba in Muradiyah, police Colonel Mudhafar al-Jubbori said.

Guerrillas also fired a mortar near the blue-domed governor's office, causing no casualties, said a spokesman for the US 42nd Infantry Division, Major Richard Goldenberg. He said Iraqi police came under small arms fire shortly afterward on a highway south of the city.

An Internet statement purportedly by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for the Baquba attacks.

In Baghdad, gunmen killed two police and wounded a third in a drive-by shooting in the eastern slum of Sadr City, said Abdul Jabar Solan, director of a hospital where the casualties were brought.

Two civilians were also killed when a roadside bomb targeting a joint US-Iraqi military convoy exploded in the southeastern New Baghdad suburb.

In the latest in a wave of abductions, Jordan's Foreign Ministry spokesman said a Jordanian businessman was kidnapped in Iraq by abductors demanding US$250,000 in ransom to release him.

Yesterday's violence came a day after politicians set March 16 for the opening of the country's first democratically elected parliament in modern history as a deal hardened on Sunday to name Jalal Talabani, a leader of the minority Kurds, to the presidency.

The more powerful prime minister's job will go to Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a deeply conservative Shiite who leads the Islamic Dawa party. His nomination, which the Kurds have agreed to, is endorsed by the most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
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