Baghdad – Bombings killed seven U.S. soldiers in Baghdad and a southern city, the U.S. military said Sunday, and Iraq’s Sunni vice president spoke out against a proposed oil law, clouding the future of a key benchmark for assuring continued U.S. support for the government.
Six of the soldiers were killed Saturday in a bombing in western Baghdad, the military said in a statement. Their interpreter was also killed.
The other soldier died in a blast Saturday in Diwaniyah, a mostly Shiite city 80 miles south of the capital. Two soldiers were wounded in that attack, the military said.
Those deaths brought the number of American troops killed in Iraq since Friday to at least 15 – eight of them in Baghdad. So far, at least 71 U.S. forces have died in Iraq this month – most of them from bombs. As of Saturday, at least 3,421 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Elsewhere, several explosions were heard from the area around the Green Zone in central Baghdad, but it was unclear if any were inside the U.S.-controlled area.
In recent months, U.S. officials have been stepping up pressure on Iraq’s religiously and ethnically based parties to reach agreements on a range of political and economic initiatives to encourage national reconciliation and bring an end to the fighting.
Progress in meeting those benchmarks is considered crucial to continued U.S. support. Those benchmarks include enactment of a new law to manage the country’s vast oil wealth and distribute revenues among the various groups.
But prospects for quick approval received a setback Sunday when the country’s Sunni vice president told reporters in Jordan that the proposed legislation gives too many concessions to foreign oil companies.
“We disagree with the production-sharing agreement,” Tariq al-Hashemi told reporters on the sidelines of an international conference hosted by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum. “We want foreign oil companies, and we have to lure them into Iraq to learn from their expertise and acquire their technology, but we shouldn’t give them big privileges.”
The bill also faces opposition from the Kurds, who have demanded greater control of oil fields in Kurdish areas. Kurdish parties control 58 of the 275 parliament seats.
Iraq’s Cabinet signed off on the oil bill in February and sent it to parliament, a move that the Bush administration hailed as a major sign of political progress in Iraq. But parliament has yet to consider the legislation.
In another political setback, the leader of Iraq’s largest Shiite party, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, has been diagnosed with lung cancer and was headed to Iran for treatment, party officials said Sunday. Al-Hakim’s absence is likely to create disarray in his Supreme Islamic Council in Iraq – a Shiite party the U.S. is counting on to push through benchmark reforms.
Also Sunday, thousands of soldiers continued their search for three comrades abducted in a May 12 ambush south of Baghdad. The military insists it won’t quit until it finds the missing men or knows what happened to them.
