A deal was reached Thursday for Sunni Arabs to participate in a panel to draft the new constitution, ending weeks of political wrangling and raising prospects that the largely Sunni-inspired insurgency might be undermined as a result. And the insurgency took a direct hit with news that a top military aide to al Qaeda's front man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had been captured.
Meanwhile, six members of a public order brigade were killed and 25 wounded in a suicide car bomb against their convoy on the perilous airport road in Baghdad, an interior ministry source said, the latest episode of relentless attacks against Iraq's security forces. More than 60 people, many of them Iraqi soldiers and policemen, have been killed since Wednesday.
The insurgency is largely blamed on Sunni Arabs, who were privileged under former dictator Saddam Hussein's regime. Iraqi and US officials believe bringing them into the political process would deal a blow to those who want to keep on fighting.
But one of the chief fighters has been taken out of action.
Mohammed Khalaf Shakar, also known as Abu Talha, surrendered to US and Iraqi forces on Tuesday without a fight in Mosul after they were led to him by "multiple intelligence sources," said the US military.
Abu Talha, an Iraqi, was said to be Jordanian-born "Zarqawi's most trusted operations agent in all of Iraq," it said.
"This is a major defeat for the al Qaeda's terrorist organisation in Iraq. Zarqawi's leader in Mosul is out of business," said US Air Force Brigadier General Donald Alston.
Iraqi officials had announced the capture of Abu Talha's closest associates and financial manager in early June along with another Zarqawi aide in Mosul.
A woman was decapitated when a mortar shell hit her garden in Kirkuk near a US military base, said police.