BAGHDAD — A security pact with a time table to withdraw U.S. forces won final approval from Iraq’s government Thursday, even as suicide bombers killed 17 people and wounded more than 100. Two Americans were among the dead.
The brazen attacks — the deadliest in the heavily guarded city of Fallujah where the U.S. military has struggled for years to maintain order — raised questions about Iraq’s ability to ensure its own security as the U.S. scales down its own combat role under the newly ratified U.S.-Iraqi pact, which calls for an American pullout within three years.
Iraq’s three-member presidential council signed off on the pact Thursday, removing the last legal barrier so that the agreement can take effect Jan. 1.
It also requires American soldiers to leave the cities by the end of June and depart the country by the end of 2011.
Approval by the presidential council came one week after parliament signed off on the agreement, which was hammered out during months of tough negotiations that at times seemed on the point of collapse.
President Bush called Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani to thank them for their work on the pact, the White House said.
But the latest bombings underscore the fragility of Iraq’s recent security gains, adding new urgency to U.S. efforts to train and equip an Iraqi security force capable of maintaining order after American troops have gone home.
The two Americans were killed when a suicide driver detonated an explosives-laden car near an Iraqi checkpoint in Mosul, military spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Doherty said. Iraqi police said eight people were wounded, most of them civilians.
In Fallujah, once the symbol of Sunni Arab resistance to the U.S. occupation, truck bombers struck within minutes of each other outside the concrete barriers surrounding two police stations in different parts of the city, killing 15 people, wounding more than 100 and shattering nearby buildings, police and hospital officials said.
An al-Qaeda front group, the Islamic State of Iraq, purportedly claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on a militant website.
The bombings in Fallujah, Anbar province, were significant because they show the resilience of an insurgency that has suffered severe setbacks over the past two years as many Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda and other religious extremists.
