Iraqi government talks at impasse as 8 killed

Talks on forming Iraq's government were at an impasse Monday over Kurdish demands on the ethnically-divided city of Kirkuk and their peshmerga fighters, as violent attacks killed at least eight people. With the historic first session of the country's new parliament just two days away, Kurdish chieftain Jalal Talabani said negotiations with Iraq's election-winning Shia list had fallen into deadlock.
"There are disagreements about two points. The first is the fate of the peshmerga, and the second one is concerning Kirkuk. Our negotiations with the (Shia) alliance continue," Talabani told reporters as he announced he was heading to Baghdad for Wednesday's session of the 275-member national assembly.
Talabani, who is the frontrunner for Iraq's presidency, was speaking after Kurdish leaders said Sunday they were insisting on changes to a draft agreement setting out the terms for an alliance with the UIA, which has the largest share of seats in the new parliament with 146 members.
The Kurds, long oppressed by Iraq's Arab majority, want iron-clad commitments that their tens of thousands of peshmerga fighters will continue to provide security in the three Kurdish provinces of Arbil, Dahuk and Sulaimaniyah. They want no other Iraqi force to be allowed to enter the virtual autonomous zone without the Kurdish regional government's permission.
The Kurds also want concrete pledges that the new government will resettle the tens of thousands of Kurds expelled from Kirkuk by Saddam Hussein over three decades and that it will work to restore territory to Kirkuk that Saddam apportioned to other provinces.
As the sides debated the shape of the next government, Shia demonstrators burnt the Jordanian flag on top of the embassy in Baghdad in protest at the suspected involvement of a Jordanian man in the February 28 suicide bomb attack in Hilla, south of Baghdad, that killed 118 people. An Iraqi cameraman, Husam Hilal Sarsam, working for a Kurdish-language television station was gunned down in the northern city of Mosul, hospital sources said.
A pair of Iraqi farmers were killed and two others wounded when a car bomb targeting a US military convoy exploded in Rashid, 25 kilometres (15 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.
In the north, a truck driver in a Turkish convoy escorted by US troops was killed when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb near the village of Al-Hajaj around the refinery town of Baiji, 220 kilometres (140 miles) from Baghdad, Iraqi police said.
And in Baghdad, a bomb attack on the car of the director general of the Iraqi health ministry wounded four of his bodyguards Monday morning in eastern Baghdad, a medical source said.