Talks on Security Continue in Iraq, as Do Deaths

Bombs and gunfire rattled Iraq on Tuesday, claiming more civilian lives while closed-door talks to appoint security ministers dragged through another day without resolution.

When Prime Minister Nouri Maliki named his Cabinet ministers Saturday, he left the security jobs open and opted to appoint himself and his two deputies as temporary guardians. Iraq’s major Shiite and Sunni parties had failed for months to agree on candidates for the crucial posts of interior minister, defense minister and national security minister.

Maliki pledged Sunday to end the vacuum by filling the jobs within two or three days. His announcement was met with considerable skepticism. On Tuesday, a leader with Maliki’s United Iraqi Alliance coalition said the ministries might not be filled by Thursday.

With thousands of civilians already lost to violence and the body count creeping higher by the day, Iraqi citizens are desperate for their new government to find neutral, effective leaders for the army and police.

“The prime minister is negotiating with the blocs and they give him their opinions,” said Haider Abadi, a member of Maliki’s coalition. “The ministries will be announced as soon as there will be an agreement between the major blocs.”

Sources in the coalition said Muahmad Braa Rubai and Saadoun Dulaimi, the defense minister under interim Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, are considered front-runners for the defense minister job. As for the Interior Ministry, the blocs were said to be considering Nasr Amri, Ahmad Chalabi and Aqeel Turayhi.

The killings that have washed over the country in recent months claimed another round of victims Tuesday, all of them shot as they made their way through the streets of Baghdad.

A professor at the University of Technology was slain as he drove to work. A bureaucrat in the Ministry of Industry, also en route to work, was killed on the same street. And a policeman who was walking to work was gunned down in the restive neighborhood of Amiriya.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, an employee of the Kurdistan teachers syndicate was shot and killed.

Later Tuesday morning, a roadside bomb went off alongside an Iraqi police patrol that was wending its way through a shopping district in the New Baghdad area of the capital. The blast killed three people and wounded six.

One policeman was among the dead; most of the casualties were civilians.

A late-afternoon car bombing near a bustling square in Baghdad’s Sadr City slum killed three people and injured three.

“I grabbed my young brother and hid behind a parked car,” said Hussein Abdul-Hady, a 20-year-old student who was on his way to play soccer when he saw a minibus explode. “It was a horrible scene -- bodies without hands, people were running in chaos, screaming.”

At least eight people were killed and 21 were wounded when a bomb attached to a parked motorcycle exploded as worshipers filed out of a Shiite mosque after prayers. The mosque was damaged in the attack.

Street-to-street gun battles erupted in Samarra, north of Baghdad, on Tuesday night after gunmen stormed the headquarters of the City Council chief.

Bodyguards shot back and chased the attackers. Four people were killed in the clashes.