Baghdad, Iraq – Iraq’s new Shiite majority government announced Saturday that it had overcome weeks of wrangling and would present nominees for six vacant Cabinet posts, including Sunni Arabs for the top posts of deputy prime minister and defense minister.
The nominations were to be submitted today for parliamentary approval.
Even as the announcement raised hopes that the end of a political vacuum that has lasted for months would help quell a recent streak of deadly insurgent attacks, a late-morning bombing in Baghdad killed at least 22 people, including two people the Iraqi police identified as Americans. Dozens were reported wounded.
Schoolgirls emerging from a morning exam were among the injured.
The new appointments will complete the 35-member Cabinet of the new prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and raise the number of Sunni Arabs in the government to six.
Al-Jaafari said the names of the new ministers would be withheld until the parliamentary session, but aides said the government would now meet the Shiite leader’s promise that it would be fully representative of Iraq’s main ethnic and religious groups, including the restive Sunni minority.
After weeks of false starts and retreats on the formation of the new government, al-Jaafari has started his tenure with a reputation for indecision and even weakness among his critics, some of them within the Shiite political alliance that dominates the new government.
But this time, he told reporters, the deal on the vacant positions, particularly on the Sunni Arab nominees, is done.
Laith Kubba, a spokesman for al-Jaafari, said the Sunni Arab nominees had been approved by “many circles, not one circle.”
That was an oblique riposte to Sunni critics who have said that the rejection of a list of Cabinet nominees put forward by Sunni groups in recent weeks showed that al-Jaafari and others wanted Sunnis amen able to Shiite political goals, not people with strong credibility in their own community.
The weeks of wrangling over the new government, more than three months after millions of Iraqis went to the polls to elect their leaders for the first time, have come at a high cost.
U.S. officials, and many Iraqis, have blamed the power vacuum for a major surge over the past month in the insurgency.
That violence continued with the bombing in Baghdad on Saturday. The attack raised to about 300 the number killed in insurgent mayhem across Iraq since the al-Jaafari government won a parliamentary vote of approval 10 days ago, a level of violence with few precedents in the 25 months since U.S. troops seized Baghdad.
The death toll has included about 200 soldiers, police commandos and recruits for the new American-trained Iraqi security forces, and has thrown a deep shadow over the hopes voiced by U.S. commanders in the wake of the January elections that the advent of an elected Iraqi government would be a turning point in the war.