8 U.S. Troops Killed in Iraq

Eight U.S. troops were killed in action during a 48-hour period as insurgent violence raged in the Sunni Arab heartland of western and central Iraq, the U.S. military reported Sunday.

The attacks came as Iraq’s new, U.S.-backed government reached out to the disenfranchised Sunni Muslim minority, approving four more Sunnis to serve in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, a Shiite. But one Sunni appointee rejected the post offered to him, again underscoring sectarian divisions.

Three U.S. Marines and one sailor were killed in a bombing and gunfight Saturday at a hospital in the rebel hot spot of Haditha, 130 miles northwest of Baghdad.

Insurgents detonated a vehicle bomb while guerrillas inside the hospital fired guns and rocket-propelled grenades from windows fortified with sandbags, the U.S. military said.

Two soldiers were killed Sunday in an explosion near Khaldiya, west of Baghdad, and another was killed by a bomb near Samarra, north of the capital.

At least one Marine was killed and more than a dozen were wounded Sunday in western Iraq as troops battled insurgents in the villages of Karabilah, Sadah and Ubaydi. Cobra attack helicopters and F/A-18 Hornet jets pounded insurgent positions for several hours, killing several dozen guerrillas, Marines said.

The fatal attacks all occurred in towns that have large Sunni Arab majorities long hostile toward U.S. forces and U.S.-backed Iraqi police and military units. Repeated American strikes in all three places have failed to wipe out rebel cells, a familiar pattern in much of the Sunni heartland of central, western and part of northern Iraq.

Embittered Sunni Arabs are believed to represent most of the insurgents who have waged a brutal and effective guerrilla war against U.S.-led multinational forces and their Iraqi allies. Most Sunni Arabs stayed away from the historic election of Jan. 30.

But thus far the new government’s promises of reconciliation with Sunnis have failed to slow a daily barrage of car bombings, ambushes and assassinations.

A group headed by Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi also has taken responsibility for many attacks. On Sunday, the military announced that a Zarqawi associate, Amar Adnan Mohammed, had been captured Thursday in Baghdad.

Mohammed, also known as Abu Abbas, was the key planner for April 29 car bombings around the capital and for an April 2 attack on Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, the military said in a statement.

Inside Mohammed’s home were documents about plans to assassinate Iraqi government officials, the statement said.

More than 300 people have been killed since the first Cabinet officers were approved April 28, according to wire services. The vast majority were Iraqi civilians and security officers.

U.S. service members also have been killed, but the rate has been declining. From Feb. 1 to April 30, 146 U.S. military fatalities were recorded in Iraq, according to an Associated Press database. That is less than half the number killed in the previous three-month period, when 315 U.S. troops died.

In explaining the decline, U.S. officials cite a couple of factors: Improved tactics against car bombs and roadside explosives, and the insurgents’ shifting of their sights from U.S. forces to Iraqi police and troops, who are perceived as easier targets than better-armed U.S. forces.

As of Saturday morning, at least 1,588 U.S. service members had died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to AP figures.

The Bush administration hopes that Iraq’s move toward a representative government will draw Sunnis into the nascent political process and sap support for the insurgency. Sunnis are badly underrepresented in the 275-member transitional National Assembly, but Jafari has sought to appoint Sunnis to the Cabinet as an olive branch.

On Sunday, Jafari named Sunni Arabs to four of the six open Cabinet posts, hoping to end sectarian discord that has slowed the political process.

But Hashim Abdul-Rahman Shibli, the Sunni candidate for human rights minister, said he didn’t want a job he thought had been offered as a token.

The Assembly approved the appointment of Saadoun Dulaimi, a former lieutenant colonel in ousted dictator Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service, as defense minister. Dulaimi, a Sunni, left Iraq in 1984 and lived in exile until Hussein’s fall in 2003. How much power he will have compared with the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry, which is in charge of internal security, remains to be seen.

His candidacy for defense minister had been blocked just weeks ago but passed Sunday in a reversal that probably signaled a spirit of compromise.

The Cabinet is now expected to contain 17 Shiite ministers, eight Kurds, six Sunni Arabs and a Christian. The three deputy prime ministers include a Shiite, a Kurd and Sunni Arab. Jafari has said he may appoint a woman as the fourth deputy prime minister.

The government is soon expected to move on to its principal task: writing a new constitution. The lawmakers have a deadline of Aug. 15 to complete the document, though they may take an extension of up to six months.

Sunday’s National Assembly session suffered from the absenteeism that has become standard. More than half of the 275-member assembly stayed away from the ceremony in the U.S.-guarded Green Zone. Security concerns have kept many members from traveling to Baghdad, officials said.

Earlier in the day, gunmen assassinated a senior Transportation Ministry official, Zobaa Yaseen Khadier Mmaeni, and his driver, making them the latest victims in a bloody campaign of politically motivated killings.

Other government appointments were Osama Nujaifi, a Sunni, who will be minister of industry, and Abed Mutlak Jibouri, also a Sunni, who will become the third deputy prime minister.

Mihsin Shlash, a Shiite, was named minister of electricity, and Ibrahim Bahr Uloum, another Shiite, will be oil minister.

“This ministry is a vital one, it becomes the main vein in the economy of Iraq,” Uloum said at a news conference Sunday. “Therefore, we will seek ... to increase the production to reach its old rates. We have to restore the production to the quantity of May last year.”

Uloum had previously served as oil minister in the U.S.-picked provisional government.

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Times staff writers Saif Rasheed, Raheem Salman, Shamil Aziz and Zainab Hussein in Baghdad and Solomon Moore in Husaybah contributed to this report.