A huge car blast killed at least one person and destroyed an apartment building in a Shi'ite district of southern Baghdad on Saturday, Iraqi police said. According to Reuters, police said four others were injured when a parked minivan filled with explosives went off near the residential building.
Meanwhile, two top Republicans cast aside President George W Bush's pleas for patience on Iraq and proposed a legislation demanding a new strategy by mid-October to restrict the mission of American forces. The proposal, by veteran Senators John Warner and Richard Lugar, came on Friday as the Pentagon conceded a decreasing number of Iraqi battalions are able to operate on their own.
''American military and diplomatic strategy in Iraq must adjust to the reality that sectarian factionalism is not likely to abate anytime soon and probably cannot be controlled from the top,'' the Warner-Lugar proposal states, according to the AP.
The two senators are considered the Republican Party's foremost national security experts.
The legislation require Bush to submit by October 16 a plan to ''transition US combat forces from policing the civil strife or sectarian violence in Iraq'' to a narrow set of missions: protecting Iraqi borders, targeting terrorists, protecting US assets and training Iraqi forces. The bill suggests the plan be ready for implementation by next year.
