BAGHDAD, 2 July 2005 — A top aide to Iraq’s Shiite leader was among 18 people killed in insurgent attacks across the country yesterday, including a bombing near an office of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari’s party.

The unrest followed the release of figures showing that Iraqi deaths from attacks had fallen in June after one of the bloodiest months since Saddam Hussein was toppled in April 2003, although the US death toll was higher.

A senior adviser to Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, Sheikh Kamaleddin Al-Ghuraifi, was shot dead with two others in Baghdad on his way to Friday prayers, the Defense Ministry and Sistani’s office said.

A suicide car bomber also blew himself up near an office of Jaafari’s Islamic Dawa Party in western Baghdad, killing one and wounding another, a Defense Ministry source said.

Other attacks in Baghdad and in and around the restive city of Samarra further north killed 14 policemen and soldiers and wounded at least seven, police and army sources said.

In June, a total of 430 Iraqis were killed and 933 wounded, according to data provided by the Iraqi ministries of defense, health and the interior. The toll was down by more than one-third from 672 in May, which witnessed a surge in attacks following the formation of Iraq’s first democratically elected government in half a century under Jaafari.

Civilians accounted for 266 of the dead in June, while 123 policemen and 41 soldiers died in a total of 160 attacks, most of them car bombings. On the insurgent side, 229 were reported killed while 1,521 were detained.

More than 10,000 civilians have been killed since the handover of sovereignty to Iraqis a year ago, according to the independent Iraq Body Count website.

US casualties in June came to 77 dead, Pentagon figures showed, bringing to 1,731 the number of soldiers who have lost their lives since the US-led invasion in March 2003.

US and Iraqi forces have launched a series of sweeping raids against rebels including Operation Lightning in and around Baghdad in late May, an offensive which involves 40,000 members of Iraq’s security forces in a bid to root out insurgents in the capital.

Chief US military spokesman Air Force Brig. Gen. Donald Alston declined to give the precise number of car bombings before and after Operation Lighting took effect. But, he said “in the 25 days after Al-Barq (Operation Lightning) the number was less than half.”

In the latest counter-insurgency operation in the restive Al-Anbar province, US and Iraqi forces were “focusing on clearing insurgents and foreign fighters from the city of Hit,” a US military statement said, adding that 13 suspects were arrested in house raids.

The offensive followed Operation Spear last week, in which ground troops and airstrikes hammered suspected insurgent hideouts further west near the Syrian border.

US-led forces battled rebels in the area west of Ramadi in February, but they quickly reorganized and struck elsewhere within the vast and lawless Al-Anbar province. Both US and Iraqi officials say diehard Saddam loyalists and militant foreign fighters brought in by the Al-Qaeda network are fueling the insurgency.

A US official said Sunni Arabs who say they speak for Iraq’s insurgents have approached US officials in Baghdad several times this year, increasingly since January’s election.

But he insisted diplomats have engaged in no negotiations and no direct talks with the guerrillas and that, beyond passing back a message that violence must end, all US Embassy staff had done was to refer any grievances to the Iraqi government.

Briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, the official said he could not speak for the US military after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared to confirm reports that US officials had met insurgent representatives. But he said US policy was clear: “Nobody in my embassy has met an insurgent.”

“We have met plenty of people who come to us and say they have been sent by insurgents to ask us X and Y and Z. That happens, I would say, fairly often but we have never negotiated through these people with insurgents,” he said, putting the number of contacts this year in “single digits”.