8 Iraqis Killed in Attack on Minivan

BAQUBAH, Iraq — Gunmen in two cars opened fire on a minibus full of Iraqis traveling to work at a U.S. base today, killing eight of them and injuring the driver, officials said.

The attack took place about three miles north of Baqubah on the road to Khalis. A relative of one of the victims confirmed that the Iraqis worked at the American base in Khalis.

On Monday, at least 25 police, soldiers and government workers were slain in a series of ambushes and shootings, officials said. The deadliest attack was in the western Baghdad district of Khadra, where eight policemen died in a gun battle with insurgents, police said.

Gunmen also killed at least five other police officers, including a colonel, in attacks around the capital, police and hospital officials said. Three civilian government employees were killed in separate ambushes in Baghdad, police reported.

A policeman died in a shootout between insurgents and security forces just north of Baghdad in Taji, police said. In Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, gunmen killed a police colonel, an Interior Ministry official and three Iraqi soldiers.

In the north, gunmen killed two Iraqi soldiers in eastern Mosul and assassinated Abdul-Ghani Naimi, whose brother is a member of the Iraqi parliament.

Elsewhere, a car bomb targeted U.S. and Iraqi troops in Rawah, 175 miles northwest of Baghdad, witnesses reported. At least one person, believed to have been a civilian, was killed, the witnesses said.

Also Monday, the U.S. military said a Marine died in a nonhostile incident Sunday at a U.S. base in Ramadi. At least 1,766 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war in March 2003, according to Associated Press.

On a visit to Berlin, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, said a recent rise in suicide bombings wouldn’t derail the drafting of a constitution. But he warned of more violence ahead.