String of Rebel Attacks Leaves at Least 31 Dead

A suicide car bomber struck outside a police station in Saddam Hussein’s home city, gunmen fired into a popular bakery in Baghdad and three U.S. soldiers died Thursday as a string of attacks killed at least 31 people across Iraq.

The bloodshed occurred amid intensifying political negotiations to select the nation’s new prime minister.

The Shiite Arab-led alliance that won the most seats in last month’s national assembly election rallied behind its nominee, Ibrahim Jafari, an Islamist, and worked to stave off a challenge from secular Shiite Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister.

Both groups wooed the crucial Kurdish alliance, which drew the second-largest vote total in the election. That bloc has declared that it wants significant offices in the government along with guarantees that the new constitution will preserve federal autonomy for ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq.

Members of the Shiite factions voiced optimism but said that the talks were complex and that it might take weeks to work out compromises and put all the pieces in place.

Thursday’s deadliest incident occurred around 8 a.m. along the main road running through Tikrit, where Hussein had a Xanadu-like palace on the Tigris River.

The city is where Hussein’s Baath Party was strongest and where he had rewarded fellow Sunni Arabs with hospitals, a university, government jobs and lavish homes for officers of his Republican Guard. The last major city to fall to U.S. forces in 2003, Tikrit still smolders with loyalty to the ousted leader.

As the police station’s night shift was ending and day shift officers were coming in, a man dressed as a lieutenant drove into the crowded compound and exploded a massive bomb in the parking area. A hospital spokesman counted 15 policemen dead and 22 wounded. The explosion set nearly 20 vehicles afire.

Attacks continued across the country throughout the day.

Near Samarra, south of Tikrit, a U.S. soldier was killed and two were wounded by a roadside bomb around 9 a.m., the military said. Another makeshift bomb killed a soldier near Qaryat in Diyala province. A third soldier, assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, was killed in action in Al Anbar province.

At least 48 American troops and one Ukrainian have died in Iraq this month, down so far from the previous three months, which averaged about 100 foreign military deaths. The overall American military death toll since the war began in March 2003 is approaching 1,500, with more than 11,000 wounded.

In Kirkuk, the oil-rich city in northern Iraq that is claimed by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen, an Iraqi police convoy struck a bomb on the road, killing one policeman and wounding three. In another incident, unknown gunmen opened fire on a civilian car, killing two people.

In Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, a suicide bomber struck an Iraqi police convoy, killing five people, including a child. The police chief, who appeared to be the bomber’s target, was not harmed, according to news service reports.

In Qaim, near the Syrian border, roadside bombs killed four Iraqi national guardsmen.

And at the Happiness Bakery in Baghdad, which is owned by Shiites, one person died when two men got out of a car and raked the building with gunfire. The attack was similar to a shooting two weeks ago that killed nine people at the bakery. The business was preparing to reopen after the earlier assault.

On the political front, an ally of Allawi told the Los Angeles Times he was hopeful that an emerging liberal, secular bloc would persuade enough members of the new, 275-seat national assembly to let the interim prime minister continue in office. Allawi’s slate won 40 of the 275 seats in the election, compared with 140 seats for Jafari’s United Iraqi Alliance.

Dr. Qassim Dawood, a minister for security affairs in the interim government, said there was a groundswell of support for Allawi, although he acknowledged that Jafari’s faction, which is an alliance of 16 parties, would have to fracture for Allawi to win the 184 votes required to secure the prime minister’s post.

He said talks had been promising with the Kurds, who he said share many of Allawi’s secular approaches to policy. “Probably in a couple of days you will hear good news regarding this,” Dawood said.

A firm coalition of Allawi’s bloc and the Kurdish alliance would be enough to prevent Jafari from receiving the two-thirds vote of the assembly required to appoint the president and two vice presidents, and subsequently the prime minister.

However, a member of the United Iraqi Alliance said he was confident that the faction would prevail in negotiations with other parties because of its majority in the new assembly.

“We were astonished by [Allawi’s] decision to be a candidate,” said Saad Jawad, an official with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the alliance’s leading parties. “We do not have any objection to him personally, for this post or any other, but it came too late.”

Noting that Allawi’s group controls only 15% of the votes in the assembly, Jawad said, “This does not amount to anything!”

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Times staff writer Raheem Salman in Baghdad and special correspondents in Tikrit and Kirkuk contributed to this report.