IRAQ: Two suicide car bombers struck police checkpoints in Baghdad yesterday, killing at least 15 people, while funerals were held for some of the victims of a truck bomb on Sunday. The US military said 40 people were killed in that attack, although police sources said only 25 died.
At dawn yesterday, a suicide bomber blew up a minivan packed with explosives at a checkpoint near the Sadir hotel in the city centre. A second bomber struck Ansour Square, near an entrance to the fortified Green Zone government and diplomatic compound.
The Defence Ministry said 12 people died in the first strike. Hospital sources said at least three died in the second.
Those bombs followed Sunday's huge blast, the worst in more than a week, when a suicide truck bomb packed with 220kg (500 lb) of explosives blew up near a police station.
US forces said one soldier was killed by a roadside bomb on Monday in Samarra, a Sunni stronghold north of Baghdad. In Baghdad's Dora neighbourhood, four people were killed, including two women, when gunmen stormed their house, police said.
In Poland, President Aleksander Kwasniewski said the United States has accepted Poland's plans to pull most of its 1,700 troops from Iraq at the beginning of next year, a move that could strain the resources of the US-led coalition.
Meanwhile Sunni Arabs said yesterday they would rejoin talks on a new constitution for Iraq, in the hope of rescuing a political process that has been severely strained by unrelenting bloodshed. The Sunnis walked out of the talks last week after one of their committee members was gunned down near a restaurant.
At crisis talks on Monday, they secured pledges of better security and an inquiry into the assassination. "We will definitely return tomorrow," said Saleh Mutlaq, spokesman for the Sunni umbrella group Iraqi National Dialogue, to which slain committee member Mujbil al-Sheikh Isa belonged.
Abdul Nasser al-Jenabi, a committee member from another Sunni group, also said its demands had been met. The speaker of parliament announced the compromise in signed statement.
US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, speaking to reporters on his way to visit Kyrgyzstan, said he expected the constitution to be drafted by an August 15th deadline.
"The Sunnis and the Shias and the Kurds are all working very hard on the constitution. They're going to get the job done. They will have a constitution, in my view," he said.
Iraq's government and its US sponsors hoped the presence of Sunnis on the constitution-writing team would help to defuse an insurgency being led by members of the 20 per cent minority, which dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said a constitution was "important in terms of weakening the insurgency and winning the population away from al-Qaeda and the other foreign terrorists who come here to kill and maim and use Iraqis as cannon fodder for their larger agenda".