Roadside Bomb Kills U.S. Soldier

Five Iraqis were killed in drive-by shootings on Saturday, including a tribal sheik, while a U.S. Army soldier died in a roadside bomb attack, officials said.

The bodies of three Iraqis who had been kidnapped and tortured also were found in the capital of Iraq, police said.

The violence came as Prime Minister-designate Nouri al-Maliki struggled to put together his Cabinet, the final step in establishing his new government of national unity. The pace has been slow because of competing rivalries among Iraq's political parties, most of which represent specific religious or ethnic groups.

Frustration with the process led one Shiite party, Fadhila, to announce Friday that it was withdrawing from the Cabinet negotiations, saying the process was being driven by partisan self-interest and U.S. pressure.

The party said its 15 legislators will now form an opposition bloc in parliament.

Al-Maliki is working against a constitutional deadline of May 22 to present his Cabinet to 275-member parliament for its approval. Squabbles over top posts such as the oil, defense and interior ministries threaten to push the talks down to the wire.

Some lawmakers have suggested that al-Maliki could present some of his Cabinet on Sunday and take for himself the defense ministry which controls Iraq's military - and the interior portfolio, which oversees Iraqi police - until all parties agree on who should head them.

The death of the U.S. Army soldier in a roadside bombing at 4 a.m. south of Baghdad on Saturday raised to at least 2,437 the number of members of the American military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Saturday's worst attacks involving Iraqis occurred in Mosul, a mostly Sunni Arab city 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.

Suspected insurgents riding in what looked like a taxi shot and killed Idrees Shihatha, a local tribal sheik, as he drove his car, said police Brig. Abdul-Hamid al-Jibouri.

In another part of Mosul, a drive-by shooting killed four Iraqis and wounded one who were driving to the city from another part of Iraq, said al-Jibouri.

In Baghdad on Saturday, police found the bodies of three Iraqi men who had been tortured. Death squads and militias have kidnapped and killed hundreds of Sunni Arabs and Shiites in this fashion, often motivated by sectarian hatred.

Eight Iraqis also died in other violence on Friday.

The bullet-riddled bodies of four Shiites were found dumped near Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. Two separate gunbattles that day killed police Lt. Oras Habib in Baghdad and a local official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party in Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, police said.

Kurdistan's parliament recently formally unified the Kurdish region's two long-standing regional governments, one headed by the PUK and the other by the Kurdistan Democratic Party. The step was expected to consolidate and strengthen the Kurds' push for power in the north, where they have enjoyed self-rule in three provinces.

In earlier violence, an armed confrontation between two Iraqi army units left one soldier and one civilian dead near Duluiyah, about 45 miles north of Baghdad.

The clash on Friday raised questions about the U.S.-trained force's ability to maintain control at a time when sectarian and ethnic tensions are running high.

It also illustrated the command and control problems facing the new Iraqi army, which the Americans hope can take over security in most of the country by the end of the year.
By BUSHRA JUHI