Women grieve on Tuesday during the funeral of Iraqi Army Maj. Gen. Adnan Midhish Kharagoli who was killed in Baghdad. (Reuters)

BAGHDAD, 20 April 2005 — Rebel attacks killed at least 12 people in Iraq yesterday as a steep increase in violence piled pressure on politicians struggling to form a government more than 11 weeks after elections.

In Baghdad, a suicide car bomber killed four National Guards in the Athamiya district, police and hospital officials said. Thirty-eight people were wounded in the blast — the latest in a string of car bombings in the capital in the past week.

Another suicide car bomber detonated next to a US Army convoy traveling close to the capital’s international airport and locals said there were many casualties. A US military spokesman said he had no immediate information.

West of the capital, insurgents opened fire on members of Iraq’s National Guards in the restive town of Khaldiya, killing five people and wounding four, police said. Near Haditha, another violent city on the River Euphrates northwest of the capital, residents said US warplanes bombed a suspected insurgent hideout. Local doctor Waleed Al-Hadithi said two people were killed and three wounded.

Al-Qaeda’s wing in Iraq, led by Jordanian militant Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, said a member of its “martyrs’ brigade” carried out the car bombing on the National Guards in Baghdad, according to a statement posted on the Internet.

In a chilling raid underlining insecurity in post-Saddam Iraq, several men in army uniforms late Monday forced their way into the southern Baghdad home of Maj. Gen. Adnan Faush Farawni, a senior adviser to the Defense Ministry. Both he and his son, Capt. Alladin Farawni, who worked in intelligence, were shot dead, the interior and defense ministries told AFP.

In another Monday evening attack, an inspector general for southern provinces, Brig. Gen. Hussein Hato Al-Jabeeri, and his driver were shot dead in their car in Amara, some 350 kilometers southeast of Baghdad, a police captain said. On Sunday, another top ranking officer, Brig. Gen. Yunis Mohammed Sulaiman, was murdered on his way to work in the main northern city of Mosul.

In the continuing bloodshed that leaves civilians unspared, three men in a car yesterday gunned down Fuwad Ibrahim Al-Bayatie, head of the German language department at Baghdad University outside his west Baghdad home, an Interior Ministry official said.

Fears for the safety of its civilian nationals brought a call from the Philippines government yesterday for them to leave Iraq. The call came after two Filipinos died in Iraq last week. President Gloria Arroyo’s spokesman Ignacio Bunye said the attacks were a “warning that the situation in Iraq remains dangerous to our people.” Up to an estimated 6,000 Filipinos work in Iraq, many for the US military.

In Stockholm, the Foreign Ministry said a Swede of Iraqi origin had gone missing in Syria while on his way to Iraq and had not been heard from for three weeks. According to Swedish news agency TT, the man, whose name was not disclosed, is a senior member of the Iraqi Communist Party and was working as an economic adviser to the Iraqi government when he disappeared.

Meanwhile, politicians pushed on with their efforts to reach agreement on the makeup of the new Iraqi government, 11 weeks after general elections won by the Shiite majority and the Kurds. An MP involved in the negotiations, Mariam Al-Rais, from the majority United Alliance list, said the government should be announced by the end of the week.

A last sticking point involved the number of ministries to be given to members of the outgoing Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s formation, she said. The Shiite-based United Alliance was expected to be handed 17 ministries, including interior, oil and finance, while the Kurds would get nine, retaining the Foreign Ministry, Al-Rais told AFP.

Angry MPs suspended a sitting of Parliament for an hour yesterday and then passed a motion demanding an official apology from the United States after an MP was manhandled by a US soldier at a checkpoint in Baghdad. They called for the soldier to be disciplined.

The US Army said a 51-year-old man detained at Camp Bucca, in the south of the country, died yesterday, apparently of natural causes. Camp Bucca, the country’s largest US-run detention facility, has more than 6,000 inmates. US and Iraqi forces are currently holding more than 17,000 people.

On the economic front, Iraq has officially resumed crude oil exports to Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, a State Oil Marketing Organization official said. He declined to give any new export statistics for security reasons. Oil exports through Turkey, previously averaging 350,000 barrels per day from Kirkuk oil fields in northern Iraq, have repeatedly been brought to a halt by sabotage.

— With input from agencies