A report this month from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a leading Washington foreign policy think-tank, said: "If the Maliki government does not make such progress by this fall, it will probably lose credibility.
"Trust and hope will have eroded too far, and the US-led security operation will be seen as another occupation," it warned, in a paper written by Anthony Cordesman, a former director of intelligence assessment at the Pentagon.
Meanwhile, gunmen killed four members of a Shiite family, including two children and a woman, who were fleeing their home in the city of Baquba yesterday after receiving threats, police said.
At least 11 other people were wounded when gunmen sprayed bullets on the family as they carried their belongings to a car in the Tahrir neighborhood of Baquba, north of Baghdad.
The wounded included five women and a girl.
One of the survivors said the attack was carried out because the victims were Shiites, suggesting that the gunmen were Sunni extremists.
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