Iraqi politics stumble as violence continues

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraqi political parties have run into major obstacles in talks on a new national unity government, officials said Sunday, raising the possibility of a major delay that would be a setback to U.S. hopes for a significant reduction in troop levels this year.

In northeastern Iraq, search parties found the wreckage of a German private plane that went missing in bad weather three days earlier with five Germans and one Iraqi on board. Iraqi and U.S. officials said there was no sign of survivors.

Gunmen ambushed a convoy of trucks carrying construction material to the U.S. military north of Baghdad on Sunday, killing four Iraqi drivers. A police general also died in a roadside bombing in northern Iraq a day after 20 people, including a U.S. soldier, were killed in a spate of bombings and shootings.

Today, a bomb exploded near Liberation Square in central Baghdad, killing at least four laborers and wounding 14, police and hospital officials said.

U.S. officials hope a new government that includes representatives of all Iraq’s religious and ethnic communities can help calm violence by luring the Sunni Arab minority away from the Sunni-dominated insurgency so that U.S. and other foreign troops can begin to head home.

But prospects for a broad-based coalition taking power soon appeared in doubt after officials from the Shiite and Kurdish blocs said talks between the two groups had revealed major policy differences.

Also Sunday, police found bodies of six men – bound, blindfolded and shot execution-style – in two locations of the capital. They appeared to be victims of sectarian killings.

A hard-line Sunni clerical group renewed accusations that the Shiite-dominated interim government is operating death squads to kill Sunni civilians and called on Muslim countries to support Iraq’s Sunni community.

Sheik Ismaiel al-Badri of the Association of Muslim Scholars said more than 300 Sunni Arabs have been assassinated in Baghdad over the past four months. The figure could not be independently confirmed.