Insurgents using roadside bombs and small arms fire killed three US soldiers and wounded four, the military said yesterday, and several Iraqis died in other attacks.
Meanwhile, US aircraft destroyed more militant safe houses near the Syrian border, and apparently killed a senior al-Qaeda figure in Iraq who was using religious courts to try Iraqis who supported coalition forces, the military said.
In Baghdad, back-room dealmaking continued as political blocs sought to forge new alliances before today's deadline for them to file candidate lists for Iraq's Dec. 15 election.
On Wednesday, three Sunni Arab groups -- the General Conference for the People of Iraq, the Iraqi Islamic Party and the Iraqi National Dialogue -- joined forces to field candidates in the election, which was made possible by Iraq's newly ratified Constitution.
But an influential group of hardline Sunni Arab clerics, the Association of Muslim Scholars, denounced the Constitution and said they will not join the political process.
Those contradictory statements signaled confusion within the minority Sunni Arab community, which forms the core of the insurgency, over how to go forward after it failed to block ratification of the new Constitution in the Oct. 15 referendum.
Two US Army soldiers were killed on Wednesday when their convoy hit a roadside bomb in eastern Baghdad, the military said. That same day, a roadside bomb and small arms fire struck an Army patrol near Ashraf village, north of Baghdad, killing one US soldier and wounding four, the military said.
The deaths raised to at least 2,004 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.
In Baghdad yesterday, a suicide attacker rammed his car into a US military convoy in Karada, a commercial and residential district, at 7:30am, killing one Iraqi passer-by, wounding nine others and damaging two parked cars, said Captain Mohammed Abdul Ghani. US forces quickly sealed off the area and it was not immediately known if they had suffered casualties.
In Dora, one of the capital's most violent areas, a drive-by shooting by insurgents killed police Lieutenant Colonel Mahdi Hussein in his car, officials said.
Two other Iraqis were killed outside Baghdad.
Saddam Trial
Meanwhile, lawyers for former president Saddam Hussein said on Wednesday that after the killing last week of the defense attorney for one of Saddam's co-defendants, they have ended any participation in the work of the Iraqi court hearing cases about mass killings under Saddam's rule.
The lawyers demanded that the Iraqi government provide them with 15 bodyguards each, a level of protection at least equal to the security provided to top Iraqi Cabinet ministers and US officials here.
Officials working with the court said after the killing yesterday that they were ready to provide "substantial protection" to the defense lawyers, and both sides have said discussions are continuing. But it was unclear whether agreement on the protection issue would end the boycott.
The lawyers' decision, which followed a call by the Iraqi Bar Association for an end to any involvement with the court after the lawyer's killing, posed fresh obstacles to plans for as many as a dozen trials in Baghdad for Saddam and his associates. The lawyers renewed claims on Wednesday that the rights of Saddam and seven co-defendants were being violated in the first of the trials before the court, which opened briefly last week and adjourned until Nov. 28, making a "fair and transparent trial" impossible.
Although they made no explicit threat to boycott the court over these rights issues, the defense lawyers have acknowledged that they intend to make it as difficult as possible for the Iraqi government and the Bush administration, the decisive voice in many issues here, to continue prosecuting Saddam and his associates in Baghdad. Some of the lawyers have said they hope to delay the trials indefinitely, in the expectation that a worsening of the war here will ultimately make their continuation impossible.
The potential for disruption to proceedings over issues involving the defendants' rights was demonstrated on Sunday, when the five-judge panel in the first case, despite the 40-day recess, took testimony from a former secret police official who is near death from lung cancer in a US military detention center. He was not represented by counsel, and no defense lawyers were present.
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