Bad week for diplomats in Iraq

Four armed men opened fire on the Bahraini envoy's car in the capital's upscale Mansour neighbourhood as he was being driven to work on Tuesday, a police source said. The driver was unharmed.

A hospital source said the envoy, Hassan Malalla al-Ansari, was wounded in the right hand by a single bullet.

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Later on Tuesday, armed men opened fire on a convoy carrying Pakistan's envoy to Iraq in the third attack on a senior diplomat in three days, police sources said.

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Egypt's envoy was kidnapped over the weekend.

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Sunni Arab cleric Harith al-Dhari condemned all kidnappings, calling them "a bad phenomenon that emerged after the occupation of Iraq by America and its allies".

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Also on Tuesday, four female employees at Baghdad airport were killed and three others wounded after armed men attacked the minibus taking them to work, said an Interior Ministry source.

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Also in the capital, a convoy of western security guards was hit by a roadside bomb on Tuesday outside the Iranian embassy, wounding an Iraqi civilian and damaging a vehicle, the US military and security sources said.

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In a separate incident, the US military said one of its patrols was hit with a roadside bomb in southeastern Baghdad and that "there were several casualties transported to hospital".

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Elsewhere, armed men seized eight Iraqis as they drove to work at a US base in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, said police Colonel Modhafar al-Majmaie. A car bomb killed two civilians in western Baghdad, police said.

In separate incidents in Mosul, armed men killed a senior member of the Kurdish Democratic Party's (KDP) Mosul branch and a bodyguard of the provincial Nineveh governor, officials said.

Iraqi soldiers were also killed and others injured in a car bomb explosion targeting their patrol in al-Shuhada neighbourhood south of Falluja, medical sources told Aljazeera.

In Tal Afar, about 50km west of Mosul, armed men assassinated a council member, Abdul Kareem Suleiman, officials said.

  Aljazeera article

Those "last throes" can be doozies.

Meanwhile, the parliament is still trying to organize itself and write a constitution.

Iraq's parliament formally welcomed on Tuesday 15 new Sunni Arab members to the committee tasked with writing a constitution, making it the first national political body to include significant representation from Saddam Hussein's formerly dominant minority since the election.

The committee was expanded to 71 members to include more Sunni Arabs. Previously there were just two.

The committee, which must agree on a draft constitution by 15 August ahead of an October referendum and December election, will have its first full meeting on Wednesday, committee chairman Humam Hamoudi said.

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"The really hard bargaining hasn't started yet," one Western diplomat said last week. "It'll get into the really heavy-duty horse-trading at the end of the month."