BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s political crisis worsened yesterday as five more ministers announced a boycott of Cabinet meetings, leaving the embattled prime minister’s unity government with no members affiliated with Sunni political factions.
Meanwhile, a suicide bomber killed at least 28 persons in a northern city, including 19 children, some playing hopscotch and marbles in front of their homes.
The U.S. military reported five American deaths: Four soldiers were killed in a combat explosion in restive Diyala province north of the capital yesterday, and a soldier was killed and two were wounded during fighting in eastern Baghdad on Sunday.
The new cracks in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government appeared even as U.S. military officials sounded cautious notes of progress on security, citing strides against insurgents linked to al Qaeda in Iraq but also new threats from Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias.
Despite the new U.S. accusations of Iranian meddling, the U.S. and Iranian ambassadors met yesterday for their third round of talks in just over two months. A U.S. Embassy spokesman called the talks between U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and his counterpart, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, “frank and serious.”
But it was Mr. al-Maliki’s troubles that seized the most attention.
The Cabinet boycott of five ministers loyal to former Iraqi leader Iyad Allawi left the government, at least temporarily, without Sunni participants — a blow to the prime minister’s attempt to craft reconciliation among the country’s majority Shi’ites and minority Sunnis and Kurds.
The Allawi bloc, a mixture of Sunnis and Shi’ites, cited Mr. 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 Mr. al-Maliki, a Shi’ite, 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 yesterday with Mr. Crocker and a White House envoy.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States was working well with the al-Maliki government, but he did not give the kind of enthusiastic endorsement that President Bush and his aides once did.
“There’s a very healthy political debate that is going on in Iraq, and that is good,” Mr. McCormack said. “It’s going to be for [the Iraqi people] to make the judgments about whether or not that government is performing.”
Meanwhile, Iraqi authorities girded for a major Shi’ite 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 Shi’ite saint, was struck by tragedy in 2005, when thousands of Shi’ite pilgrims, panicked by rumors of a suicide bomber, broke into a stampede on a bridge, killing 1,000.
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