World

Rice: Iraq Needs 'Strong Leader'

April 3, 2006 / 12:53 PM EDT / CBS/AP

Two car bombs exploded in Baghdad on Monday, killing a bystander and wounding half a dozen others. Gunmen shot down six people, including a child, in a market area of the southern city of Basra, police said.

Also Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw urged Iraqi leaders to form a government as soon as possible to curb the bloodshed and rein in sectarian militias behind much of the country's violence.

Violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims has escalated since a Feb. 22 bombing of an important Shiite shrine in Samarra and reprisal attacks against Sunni institutions.

The car bombings happened early Monday, one in eastern Baghdad's Sadr City slum, the other in the central district of Karradah, both mostly Shiite areas. The Sadr City explosion killed at least one civilian and wounded seven others, including a 9-year-old boy, and two were wounded in Karradah. The targets were not known, police said.

The visit by Rice and Straw comes at a time of uncertainty over the fate of interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shiite nominee for a second term but widely blamed for the deadlock in talks on forming a unity government following the Dec. 15 election.

Sunni and Kurdish politicians have called for the Shiite bloc to replace al-Jaafari as its nominee. Last weekend, two prominent Shiite politicians joined calls for the prime minister to step aside a sign that al-Jaafari's support is cracking.

In other developments:

Four American troops were killed by hostile fire in Iraq's volatile Anbar province, the U.S. military said Monday. The three Marines and one sailor died Sunday, according to a military statement. The deaths brought to at least eight the number of U.S. service members killed in Iraq this month, the largest number of U.S. deaths in a single attack in over a month.

Gunmen shot down six people, including a child, in a market area of the southern city of Basra, police said. The victims included a navy officer, two policemen, two workers at an electrical plant, and the boy, police said.

In Baghdad's Dora district, four gunmen charged into a Shiite home late Sunday, lined up a brother, two sisters, and an uncle against a wall and shot them dead, police said. The father of the family, a grocery shop owner, had been killed six months earlier by gunmen in the same neighborhood, one of Baghdad's most dangerous.

Also in Dora, drive-by shooters killed a police captain outside his home late Sunday, police said.

Police discovered two corpses in eastern Baghdad — one in Mashtal that was handcuffed and shot in the head, another in Baladiyat that was strangled and covered with bandages.

The regional government of Kurdistan released Kurdish writer Kamal Karim just a week after he received an 18-month sentence for articles on a Kurdish Web site that accused one of the region's top leaders of corruption, said Mohamed Khoshnaw, a government spokesman. The prime minister of the Kurdish regional government issued a pardon for Karim, citing international pressure to release the writer.

Former hostage Jill Carroll arrived in Boston on Sunday. The Christian Science Monitor reporter was held captive for 82 days in Iraq.

The bodies of two Apache helicopter pilots that crashed southwest of Baghdad were recovered, the military said. Officials believe the helicopter was shot down.

Rice and Straw, who arrived Sunday for a surprise, two-day visit, made clear they are frustrated with the slow pace of talks on a new government and said the country needs a strong prime minister as quickly as possible.

During a press conference before departing Monday, both Rice and Straw were careful to avoid specifically calling for al-Jaafari to be shunted aside. But Rice said the next Iraqi prime minister must be a "strong leader" capable of unifying the people of this fractured land.

"We have emphasized, Secretary Rice and myself, time and again that who becomes nominated and elected ...including the prime minister is a matter of sovereign decisions by the sovereign parliament," Straw said.

But he added "somebody has to fill these positions and fill them quickly and we've urged those we have been speaking to to do so."

Both Rice and Straw spoke of the need for the next government to curb the power of sectarian militias alleged to have been behind the wave of reprisal killings of Shiites and Sunnis.

"You have to have the state with a monopoly of power," Rice said. "We have sent very strong messages" that there must be "a reining in of militias."

Rice and Straw said they set no deadlines, and there were no immediate signs of progress following the string of meetings the two held Sunday with Iraqi politicians and ethnic and religious power brokers.

Some Iraqi leaders said they welcomed the help from Rice and Straw.

"When this becomes so difficult and when the situation cannot wait, any intervention that serves the (national) interest and helps save the country from bloodbath ... could be useful," said Naseer al-Ani of the Iraqi Islamic Party.

Others called it mere meddling.

"I think that their interference is bad, and it further complicates issues because this is an Iraqi matter," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish politician.