BAGHDAD, 16 April 2007 — The political bloc of firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr will withdraw from the embattled Iraqi government today, a lawmaker from the group said yesterday. “We will announce our withdrawal from the government tomorrow,” MP Saleh Hassan Issa Al-Igaili said, adding that the group will however continue to participate in the Parliament. The Sadr group has six Cabinet ministers in Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s government and 32 lawmakers in the 275-member Parliament.

Igaili said the decision to pull out of the government was taken to press its demand for a timetable for US-led troops to withdraw from Iraq. Sadr, a known anti-American cleric, has strongly opposed the US presence in the country since the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime four years ago.

On Wednesday, the group had threatened to pull out of the government after Maliki opposed laying down such a timetable. Igaili said the current government has also failed to provide basic services and amenities to the people of Iraq.

The group has opposed an ongoing Iraqi and US security plan in Baghdad, which officials say has seen Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia melt away from the streets of the capital to avoid capture. Maliki last week during a trip of Tokyo rejected demands by the US Congress for a timetable to pull out American troops, saying any withdrawal should be based on the situation on the ground.

Earlier, insurgent bomb attacks massacred 35 people in Shiite shopping areas of Baghdad yesterday, while two British helicopters crashed after an apparent midair collision that killed two crewmembers.

Eighteen people died when a booby-trapped car blew up outside a restaurant and a second ripped through a market in the southern Al-Shurta Al-Arabaa suburb of Iraq’s capital, in bloody defiance of a two-month-old security crackdown. “Of those killed 10 are men, five women and three children,” said a medic at Yarmuk Hospital, adding that 35 wounded were receiving treatment, among them more women and children.

As the skeleton of burned wreckage still smoldered, a bus rigged with bombs exploded in a downtown shopping district in Karrada, killing at least 11 people and wounding 18, defense and security sources said.

In the northern and predominantly Shiite district of Al-Utaifiyah, a suicide bomber boarded a minibus and blew himself up, killing six people and wounding 10, said another security official on condition of anonymity.

Two British helicopters crashed in Iraq yesterday, killing two Britons and seriously wounding a third, although officials said the incident appeared to have been a midair accident rather than the result of hostile fire.

“Now that next of kin have been informed, I can confirm that the two helicopters reported this morning as having crashed north of Baghdad earlier today were, in fact, both UK helicopters,” British Defense Secretary Des Browne said in London. Prime Minister Tony Blair said it would be a time of “great grief and anguish” for the families of those killed.

But Blair’s remarks were countered in Baghdad by US Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel who said the support by the Americans and its allies for Iraq was “not open ended.”

Hagel, on his fifth trip to Baghdad said: “We can’t continue to stay in Iraq the way we are. It never was intended to be an open-ended commitment.” Hagel has supported Congress decision to tie new funds for Iraq with a timetabled withdrawal of troops by 2008.