IRAQ:The Iraqi prime minister and president announced a new alliance of moderate Shias and Kurds in a push to save the crumbling government yesterday, saying a key Sunni bloc refused to join but the door remained open to them.
The political pact came amid a grim backdrop: more bodies being pulled from the rubble of the most deadly suicide bombing assault of the war. The interior ministry spokesman set the death toll in northwestern Iraq to at least 400 from Tuesday's attacks against a small religious sect. Earlier, some authorities outside the government said at least 500 people had died. Tents, food aid, clean water and medicine were rushed to the area.
In Baghdad, a car bomb struck a parking garage in a central commercial district during the morning rush hour yesterday, killing at least nine people and wounding 17, police said.
Smoke poured out of the seven-storey concrete building, and food and merchandise stalls below were left charred.
The US military also said two soldiers had been killed and six wounded the day before in fighting north of Baghdad, raising to at least 44 the number of American troop deaths this month.
Prime minister Nouri Maliki said the agreement was the first step to unblock political stagnation that has gripped his Shia-led government since it took power in May 2006.
But the announcement after three days of intense negotiations was disappointing because it did not include Iraq's Sunni vice-president Tariq al-Hashemi and his moderate Iraqi Islamic Party.
Mr Maliki has been criticised for having a Shia bias and failing to stop Iraq's sectarian violence, which persists despite the presence of tens of thousands of extra US troops.
"This agreement is a first step," Mr Maliki said. "It is not final and the door is still open for all who agree with us on the need to push the political process forward."
At the news conference announcing the political accord, Mr Maliki was flanked by Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, the leader of the northern autonomous Kurdish region and elder statesman, Massoud Barzani, and Shia vice-president Adel Abdul-Mahdi.
The four men signed a three-page agreement which they said ensures them a majority in the 275-member parliament that would allow action on legislation demanded by the US.
Their parties - two Shia, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and Dawa, and two Kurdish, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Democratic Party of Kurdistan - hold a total of 181 seats. Mr Maliki also called on the Sunni Accordance Front, which is the largest Sunni bloc with 44 seats and includes Mr Hashemi's party, to return to the government and heal a rift that opened when the bloc's five cabinet ministers quit the government.
The four-party agreement was unveiled four weeks before the top US commander in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus, and US ambassador Ryan Crocker are to deliver a progress report on Iraq to Congress.
"We have relegated efforts to topple the government to the past. We are now in a new stage," said Mr Maliki's adviser, Yassin Majeed. "We will keep working to bring the Accordance Front back, but if they insist we will have a majority in parliament and bring in new ministers."
Mr Maliki previously said he was ready to name rival Sunnis to the vacant cabinet positions. He even mentioned reaching out to Sunni tribal sheiks who have joined forces with the Americans against al-Qaeda in Iraq in the western Anbar province.
Emergency workers and grieving relatives in northern Iraq, meanwhile, pressed ahead with recovery efforts two days after a string of suicide truck bombings devastated the village of Qahataniya near the Syrian border. The attacks targeted Yazidis, a small Kurdish-speaking sect whose members are considered to be blasphemers by Muslim extremists.