Iraq on Wednesday convened its elected National Assembly after last-minute bargaining over Sunni Arab candidates to head the parliament. The lawmakers opened with a reading of verses from the Quran. Iraqi Chief Justice Medhat al Mahmoud then administered the oath to the assembled deputies.
Shiite officials said they failed to reach final agreement in talks with the Kurds and the Sunni Arabs on forming new government. But those failures were not enough to prevent the 275-member National Assembly from preparing to meet Wednesday for the first time since the Jan. 30 elections.
"It will be a historic event because the Iraqi people will witness an elected parliament for the first time in their lives," said ahead of the meeting Ali al-Dabagh, a member of the Shiite clergy-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, which won the most seats in the elections.
According to The AP, Al-Dabagh added that Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni Arab politicians would meet after the deputies are sworn in "to finalize things. We need two to three days to announce an agreement." Outgoing foreign minister Kurd Hoshyar al-Zebari said he expected a deal to be reached soon.
Meanwhile, a car bomb exploded Wednesday near an army checkpoint in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. The blast killed five Iraqi soldiers and wounded 15 other people. The bomber also died.
Elsewhere, a car bomb targeting a US military convoy blew up in the southern Baghdad district of Dura, killing one civilian and wounding a dozen others, security sources said, according to AFP.
The Iraqi parliament convened one day after Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi announced plans to withdraw his country's 3,000 troops. "Starting with the month of September, we would like to proceed with a gradual reduction of our soldiers," Berlusconi said on a state TV talk show that lasted into early Wednesday.
Withdrawing Italian troops "will depend on the capability of the Iraqi government to equip itself with adequate police and security forces" to establish "acceptable" security levels, the Italian leader said.
