BAGHDAD, 8 May 2005 — Iraq’s leaders yesterday reached a deal on key Cabinet posts, agreeing on a Sunni Arab defense minister to fight insurgents who killed another 22 people, including two Americans, in a mid-afternoon suicide attack in the capital Baghdad.

Sources in the two strongest blocs in Parliament, the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance and the powerful Kurdish coalition, said agreement had been reached on filling the vacant ministries, including defense and oil.

They said Saadoun Al-Dulaimi, a Sunni Arab, would be the new defense minister while Ibrahim Bahr Al-Uloum, a Shiite, would run the Oil Ministry. Dulaimi comes from the predominantly Sunni city of Anbar in the western Anbar province.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari confirmed a deal had been reached on five vacant Cabinet posts and said it would be put to Parliament for approval today. Talks are still going on to finalize the full line-up of deputy prime ministers.

Many Iraqis say the delay in forming a government after the historic Jan. 30 elections allowed the insurgents to regroup. Even when the Cabinet was sworn in last Tuesday — more than three months after the elections — several top posts were vacant.

Yesterday’s blast brought chaos to central Baghdad. Two suicide car bombs exploded in a well-known square. Aside from the 22 dead, at least 36 Iraqis and three Americans were wounded in the attack.

The American victims were traveling through Tahrir Square in a three-car convoy that was hit toward the front and the back by the two suicide car bombs, the US military said.

The explosions also hit civilians in the areas, damaged shops and set fire to other vehicles. The remains of several mutilated bodies were seen lying in the street as fire trucks fought the blaze, which sent a large plume of black smoke up into the sky.

The US Embassy said the three wounded Americans did not appear to suffer life-threatening injuries. It said officials were trying to determine if other foreign casualties had resulted from the attack.

Iraqi police first said the attack involved one suicide car bomb, but US Embassy spokesman Bob Callahan later said two had exploded. He said the two American fatalities were security contract workers, but the embassy withheld the names of them and their company until the victims relatives could be notified. Two of the security convoy’s vehicles were reduced to smoldering wrecks. One bleeding foreigner staggered away, clutching his head.

The wounded included five schoolgirls who were hurt when the blasts damaged Al-Aqida Secondary School and a minibus driving by with students from nearby Dijla Elementary School.

Elsewhere, A US Marine was killed by a bomb in central Iraq. The Marine died of injuries caused by an explosion during combat operations in Karmah, 80 km west of Baghdad.

US and Iraqi forces said they captured a key associate of Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, leader of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in western Iraq on April 26. Ghassan Muhammad Amin Husayn Al-Rawi had helped the group by arranging meetings and helping foreign insurgents.

On Friday bodies of 14 Iraqis were found at a garbage dump. Relatives yesterday identified them as Sunni Arabs, raising the specter of deeper sectarian strife in Iraq where mass killings of Shiites have already inflamed anger.

Relatives of the victims said the dead were farmers from the town of Madaen just south of Baghdad, where tit-for-tat kidnappings and killings between Shiites and Sunnis have sparked tension across Iraq.

— Additional input from agencies