Iraq's political crisis worsened as five more ministers said they would boycott Cabinet meetings -- leaving the embattled prime minister's unity government with no members affiliated with Sunni factions.
Also on Monday, a suicide bomber killed at least 28 people in a northern city, including 19 children, some playing hopscotch and marbles in front of their homes. The US military also reported five new US deaths, including four soldiers who were killed in a combat explosion in restive Diyala Province north of the capital on Monday and a soldier killed during fighting in eastern Baghdad on Sunday.
The new cracks in Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government appeared even as US military officials sounded cautious notes of progress on security, citing strides against insurgents with al-Qaeda links but also new threats from Iranian-backed Shiite militias.
Despite the new US accusations of Iranian meddling, the US and Iranian ambassadors met on Monday for their third round of talks in just over two months.
A US embassy spokesman called the talks between US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and his counterpart, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, "frank and serious."
But it was al-Maliki's troubles that seized the most attention.
The Cabinet boycott of five ministers loyal to former Iraqi leader Ayad Allawi left the government, at least temporarily, without participants who were members of the Sunni political apparatus -- a deep blow to the prime minister's attempt to craft reconciliation among the country's majority Shiites and minority Sunnis and Kurds.
The defense minister has a Sunni background, but has no political ties and was chosen by al-Maliki.
The Allawi bloc, a mixture of Sunnis and Shiites, cited al-Maliki's failure to respond to its demands for political reform.
The top Sunni political bloc already had pulled its six ministers from the 40-member Cabinet of al-Maliki, a Shiite, last week.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who has been trying to broker the Sunni bloc's return in a bid to hold the government together, met on Monday with Crocker and a White House envoy.
In Washington, US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the US was working well with the al-Maliki government, but he did not give the kind of enthusiastic endorsement that President George W. Bush and his aides once did.
"There's a very healthy political debate that is going on in Iraq and that is good," McCormack said. "It's going to be for them [the Iraqi people] to make the judgments about whether or not that government is performing."
Lawmaker Hussam al-Azawi, of the bloc loyal to Allawi, said the boycott began with Monday's Cabinet meeting.
The ministers intend to continue overseeing their ministries.
"We demanded broader political participation by all Iraqis to achieve real national reconciliation ... and an end to sectarian favoritism," al-Azawi said.
Meanwhile, Iraqi authorities girded for a major Shiite pilgrimage later this week in Baghdad with plans to tighten security.
Sunni insurgents often target such gatherings, and this particular annual march, to commemorate the eighth-century death of a key Shiite saint, was struck by tragedy in 2005, when thousands of Shiite pilgrims, panicked by rumors of a suicide bomber, broke into a stampede on a bridge, killing 1,000.
Iraqi Brigadier General Qassim al-Moussawi, a military spokesman for Baghdad, said the government was considering a driving ban during the march this week, but had not made a decision.
However, Iraqi security forces will intensify checkpoints and marchers will be banned from carrying weapons, cell phones or even bags, he said.
In Tal Afar in the north of the country, officials slapped an immediate curfew on the religiously mixed city after a suicide bomber blew up his truck in a crowded Shiite neighborhood.
The blast killed at least 28 people, including at least 19 children, Brigadier General Najim Abdullah said.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.