IRAQ: Spate of car bombings kills at least 60 in Iraq

A spate of car bombings and shootings across Iraq killed about 60 people on Sunday (August 27), but Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said violence was on the decrease and that the country would never slide into a civil war. A top government official said Maliki planned to reshuffle his coalition cabinet just 100 days after it was formed because he wanted to root out disloyal or poorly performing ministers and rally factions behind his national reconciliation plan. The deputy premier also told Reuters Iraq hoped its plans to attract investment and create jobs could stem a descent into civil war and that foreign leaders should back a U.N. economic package next month or face disaster for the entire Middle East. Car bombs exploded in Baghdad, the town of Khallis north of the capital, the northern oil city of Kirkuk and Basra in the Shi'ite south, a day after Maliki secured a pledge from tribal leaders to help stamp out sectarian violence and defeat insurgents. In Khallis, a religiously mixed town, gunmen stormed a market and cafe, killing 16 people and wounding 25, police said. In one of the worst attacks of the day, a bomb blew apart a minibus in a busy commercial road in central Baghdad, killing nine people and sending black smoke billowing into the air. The minibus blast followed a car bomb attack on Iraq's best-selling newspaper, the government-owned al-Sabah, that killed two employees and badly damaged the building. Editor-in-chief Falah al-Meshaal said the newspaper, part of the U.S.-funded Iraqi Media Network that Sunni insurgents have attacked before, would be published as normal on Monday. In potentially oil rich Basra, where Maliki has imposed a state of emergency to deal with increasing violence fuelled by tensions between rival Shi'ite Muslim factions, seven people were killed by a motorcycle bomb in a market, officials said. British troops are under mounting pressure in the southern oil hub. But London's new envoy to Iraq insisted on Sunday that, despite his predecessor's leaked view this month that civil war was a strong possibility, he was "optimistic" such an outcome could be avoided if Maliki could rally Iraqis behind him.

ITN Source | August 28, 2006

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