Iraq Parliament Meets as Attacks Rise

A spurt of violence left dozens of Iraqis dead Wednesday, even as the first working session began in the nation’s new parliament, a body aimed at drawing Iraq’s disparate ethnic and religious groups into the political arena.

In the restive Sunni Arab-dominated city of Fallouja, a suicide bomber attacked a crowd of aspiring police recruits, killing 18 Iraqis and injuring 20, police and hospital officials said. The U.S. military said that at least seven civilians were killed and 13 wounded.

In Baghdad, police reported a sudden increase in killings by apparent death squads. At least 34 bodies bearing single bullet-wounds to the head and marks of torture have been found in and around the capital since Tuesday morning.

At the parliamentary session, lawmakers formed an 11-member rules committee but put off a potentially divisive discussion on proposed changes to the constitution until a Cabinet is named and approved.

Mahmoud Mashadani, the new speaker of the 275-seat Council of Representatives, vowed that the lawmakers would be productive and avoid resorting to negative politics.

“We want to make a bees’ nest that produces honey, not a hornets’ nest that only stings,” he told about 160 lawmakers who showed up at the conference room in the fortified Green Zone.

Prime Minister-designate Nouri Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, has three weeks to form a government acceptable to Sunni Arab and Kurdish political blocs that have been negotiating for ministerial posts.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday that no decisions on U.S. troop cuts were likely until Iraq’s new Cabinet was in place.

Under current plans, 15 brigades with a total of 130,000 troops are scheduled to be sent to Iraq this summer, instead of the 17 brigades originally planned. But the Pentagon is in discussions with U.S. commanders in Iraq about whether the list of brigades can be cut.

Rumsfeld said U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Army Gen. George W. Casey, top commander of coalition forces in Iraq, could not make a final recommendation on troop levels until they had discussed the security situation with a new Cabinet.

Interim Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, said Wednesday that there was “positive progression” in the talks to pick a Cabinet. “We are about to get a deal, a package between all the key parliamentary blocs,” he said in an interview.

But outside the Green Zone, the stream of attacks, which had subsided somewhat, appeared to be accelerating.

The blast in Fallouja, the second suicide bombing in Al Anbar province in two days, followed a videotaped threat last week by insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi to attack Sunnis who sign up for the security forces.

But the U.S. military said in a statement that the recruitment center was reopened an hour after the attack, with potential recruits returning to sign up.

In the northern city of Mosul in Nineveh province, the convoy of Deputy Gov. Khasro Goran hit a roadside bomb Wednesday, injuring one of his guards, said an official with his Kurdistan Democratic Party.

And in a Shiite district of northern Baghdad, an explosion at a crowded market injured 11 people, police said.

To quell the mostly Sunni Arab-led insurgency, President Jalal Talabani said Sunday that he had met with leaders of seven rebel groups. But one hard-line Sunni politician dismissed the talks as insignificant.

“He hasn’t met the main members,” Saleh Mutlak, a lawmaker, told reporters Wednesday. “He has to work hard to reach them and he has to have a program to present to them to involve them in the political process.”

Shadowy groups suspected of ties to Shiite Muslim militias such as the Badr Brigade and Al Mahdi army have contributed to the violence.

In northwestern Baghdad, authorities discovered 14 bodies, part of a wave of slayings of suspected Sunni Arab insurgents or sympathizers allegedly by gunmen with ties to the security forces. At least 20 bodies were found across the capital the previous day.

One U.S. soldier died in a “noncombat-related incident” in Baghdad, the military said.

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Times staff writers Zainab Hussein and Saif Rasheed in Baghdad, Peter Spiegel in Washington and special correspondents in Baghdad and Mosul contributed to this report.