U.S. Diplomat Pays Visit Amid Widespread Violence

Insurgent attacks across Iraq killed at least 26 people, including five American troops, and visiting U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick accused guerrillas of “trying to split communities” and widen the country’s sectarian and ethnic divides.

Two of the American soldiers were killed Thursday when gunmen in a car fired on their convoy in central Baghdad, according to a military statement. A third soldier died when a roadside bomb exploded alongside his convoy in the southeast section of the capital.

About midnight, a soldier on patrol was killed in a vehicle accident caused by a roadside bomb north of Taji, the military said.

U.S. officials also confirmed that a Marine had been killed Wednesday in an attack on an American base in Ramadi.

More than 1,620 U.S. troops have been killed since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Thursday’s deadliest attack occurred in the northern city of Mosul, where insurgents launched an assault on the home of Fawaz Jarba, a member of the National Assembly. Jarba escaped unharmed, but at least 10 people were killed. U.S. forces, backed by helicopter gunships, responded to the assault. But Jarba later complained that the gunships mistakenly fired on his home after driving off four carloads of attackers.

The Americans “bombed my house and the house of my neighbor,” said Jarba, a Sunni Arab and former officer in the Iraqi army who fled during Saddam Hussein’s regime. “Seven of my security and bodyguards died by fire from both Americans and insurgents.”

U.S. military officials acknowledged that their forces had responded to the assault on Jarba’s home but didn’t mention firing on the residence.

An official at the Mosul morgue said he had received 10 bodies from the attack. Eight of the dead were identified as Jarba’s staff members or bodyguards, one was apparently an insurgent and another was burned beyond recognition.

The attack on Jarba appears to indicate the willingness of the Sunni Arab-led insurgency to target fellow Sunni Muslims regarded as collaborators with the new U.S.-backed government. Jarba defied insurgents’ threats and ran in the January parliamentary election. He was one of the few Sunnis in the United Iraqi Alliance, the largely Shiite Muslim slate that won a majority of the seats in the transitional National Assembly.

Zoellick, in his second visit to Iraq in just more than a month, called on religious leaders to speak out clearly against rising sectarian tensions, and described the bloody insurgent offensive that followed the formation of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari’s government as a nihilistic attempt to sabotage the country’s future.

“Every time people start to make progress, those who want this to fail are going to show their bloodthirsty side,” he said, praising the members of the new Iraqi government as “people of special courage and conviction.”

Zoellick expressed optimism that lawmakers would succeed in drafting Iraq’s constitution before the mid-August deadline. He also echoed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s warning to neighboring Syria to stem the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.

“We and others are watching how Syria behaves itself,” he said.

Referring to U.S. military assertions that Jordanian insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi ordered the latest guerrilla offensive in Iraq during a meeting of insurgent leaders in Syria, Zoellick said, “Countries are responsible for what occurs on their territory.”

Insurgents continued their pattern of targeting Shiite religious leaders and houses of worship. Just before midnight Thursday, a parked car exploded outside a Shiite mosque in the southeastern Baghdad neighborhood of Sayadiya, killing two, injuring six and setting a nearby building ablaze, an Interior Ministry official said.

In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, angry mourners paraded the green-draped coffin of a slain religious leader, with some calling on the new government to stem the tide of insurgent assaults. Mohammed Tahir Allaq, a representative of one of Iraq’s top religious leaders, Ayatollah Mohammed Saeed Hakim, was slain by gunmen Wednesday.

Hakim’s son and spokesman decried what he called “the intentional escalation by collaborators of criminals and Baathists” -- a reference to former members of Hussein’s Baath Party -- “against the Shia to target Iraq’s unity.... The Shia are waiting for the elected government to achieve security.”

In Baqubah, northeast of the capital, a roadside bomb killed two police officers, and a car bomb outside a Shiite mosque during noon prayers injured two worshipers.

Earlier in the day, a suicide bomber drove a car into an Iraqi army checkpoint in the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dora, killing one Iraqi soldier and wounding eight other people.

Elsewhere in the capital, gunmen assassinated Qasim Mohammed Azzawi, a professor at the Baghdad Nursing School, and Ali Hameed Rasheed, a former Oil Ministry official, in separate attacks.

In Tikrit, Hussein’s hometown, insurgents fired machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades at an Iraqi army convoy. Three Iraqi soldiers were killed and four were missing and presumed abducted, an Interior Ministry official said.

In Samarra, northwest of Baghdad, which has seesawed for months between U.S. and insurgent control, gunmen killed a police officer on his way to work as well as his father.

Special correspondents Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf, Zaydan Khalaf in Samarra and special correspondents in Mosul and Baqubah contributed to this report.