BAGHDAD, 22 March 2007 — Iraq’s vice president yesterday called for talks with the country’s insurgent groups as bomb attacks claimed more lives in and around Baghdad more than a month into a massive security plan. Despite raging violence, which has claimed more than 110 lives in three days, Iraqis were celebrating the Kurdish Nowruz spring festival, which fell a day after the nation marked the fourth anniversary of the US-led invasion.

Vice President Tariq Al-Hashemi, a Sunni, said in an interview with the BBC that militants, Al-Qaeda excluded, were “just part of the Iraqi communities.” “I do believe there is no way but to talk to everybody,” said Hashemi.

All parties “should be invited, should be called to sit down around the table to discuss their fears, their reservations,” he said, while adding that Al-Qaeda was “not very much willing, in fact, to talk to anybody.”

A senior US military official in Washington accused Al-Qaeda in Iraq of callously using children as part of its change in tactics due to tighter controls around Baghdad.

Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff told reporters on Tuesday that insurgents had detonated an explosives-rigged vehicle with two children in the back seat after US soldiers let it through a Baghdad checkpoint over the weekend.

“Children in the back seat lowered suspicion. We let it move through. They parked the vehicle, and the adults ran out and detonated it with the children in the back.”

Killings continued yesterday, with officials reporting a total of 11 people slain, eight of them in twin mortar attacks in Al-Madaen, a small town south of Baghdad.

In the capital, two people were killed when a roadside bomb targeting a passing police patrol in Palestine street exploded. Three policemen were wounded.

In another incident, a bystander was killed and two guards of the Finance Ministry were wounded when US troops detonated a car bomb they discovered next to the ministry, a Defense Ministry official said.

Security officials had on Tuesday reported 49 people killed or found murdered, most of them in Baghdad, while the toll from bombings and shootings the previous day was 25 plus another 30 corpses found in the capital.