BAGHDAD, 9 September 2007 — A small Sunni Arab political party returned to Iraqi’s Parliament yesterday after a boycott of more than two months, ending walkouts by various factions that have disrupted the legislature, as violence continued to rock Iraq.
The Iraqi National Dialogue Front, which has 11 seats in the 275-member legislature, suspended its participation in June, partly over the sacking at the time of the speaker, a Sunni Arab from a larger Sunni Arab bloc.
Mustafa Al-Hiti, a senior member of the Dialogue Front, said the party had returned because most of its demands had been met. He did not elaborate, but the speaker, Mahmoud Al-Mashhadani, was reinstated in July.
The party’s decision to attend sessions again follows the return to Parliament in recent months of the main Sunni Arab bloc, the Accordance Front, and also a faction loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr. Parliament resumed hearings this week after a month’s break.
Meanwhile, at least 10 people were killed yesterday, including four in Kufa, while security forces launched an assault in Kirkuk to flush out Sunni insurgents.
A bomb believed hidden in a bag killed four people, including two children, in a busy marketplace in Kufa, a medic and police official said.
Khalid Al-Yassiri from the health department of Najaf, the main city close to Kufa, said four people died in the blast and seven others were wounded. “Two of the dead are children,” Yassiri said.
Najaf police chief Abdel Karim Mustafa said the bomb went off in the middle of a Kufa market. “We suspect two people who were wounded to be behind the explosion. They will be interrogated,” he said.
A witness said that a man placed a bag near a vendor, a young boy, and told him he would return soon to pick up the bag. “But minutes later the bag exploded,” the witness said, on condition of anonymity.
Kufa is a bastion of Sadr whose Mahdi Army militia is allegedly involved in the killing of Sunni Arabs in Iraq’s brutal sectarian warfare.
Late Friday, gunmen killed Mohammed Al-Garaawi, a top aide of Sadr who worked at the cleric’s office in Najaf. He was gunned down in front of his house, said police chief Mustafa.
A member of the Sadr office in Najaf confirmed the killing and demanded an investigation be opened into the murder of Garaawi, who oversaw tribal affairs for the Sadr movement.
Four people were also killed in the restive city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, police and medics said. Baquba police Lt. Col. Najim Al-Sumaidae said gunmen attacked a family in the city and killed a man and a woman. Two others were killed by another group of gunmen on the main road in eastern Baquba, he said.
Doctor Ahmed Fuad from Baquba General Hospital confirmed receiving four bodies from the two attacks. In Baghdad, two brothers were killed and four other people wounded when a mortar slammed into a residential area in the eastern Al-Baladiyat neighborhood yesterday, an Iraqi Army official said.
Meanwhile, more than 400 US and Iraqi troops launched an air and ground assault around the northern oil city of Kirkuk to flush out Sunni insurgents, the US military announced.
The military also said yesterday that one of its unmanned aerial vehicle dropped a bomb and killed two suspected roadside bombers in Nineveh province, north of Baghdad.
Insurgents have launched deadly attacks over the past months in Kirkuk, a ethnically volatile oil city claimed both by the Arabs and Kurds.
Longstanding Kurdish demands for the city to be incorporated in their autonomous region in northern Iraq are due to be put to a referendum by Dec. 30.
