Talks on forming new Iraqi government were at an impasse over Kurdish demands on the ethnically-divided city of Kirkuk and their peshmerga fighters, while a car bomb killed two south of Baghdad and a cameraman was assassinated.
Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani said Monday that negotiations with Iraq's election-winning Shiite list had fallen into deadlock. "There are disagreements about two points. The first is the fate of the peshmerga, and the second one is concerning Kirkuk. Our negotiations with the (Shiite) alliance continue," Talabani told the press as he declared he was on his way to Baghdad for Wednesday's session of the 275-member national assembly.
According to AFP, he conveyed the Kurds wanted to seal an agreement with the Shiite list, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), and then bring other parties into the new government, including outgoing prime minister Iyad Allawi.
Meanwhile, an Iraqi cameraman, Husam Hilal Sarsam, working for a Kurdish-language television station was assassinated in Mosul, hospital sources in the northern city said. Sarsam was kidnapped two weeks ago, a member of his family told AFP.
Elsewhere, two Iraqi civilians were killed and two others wounded Monday when a car bomb targeting a US military convoy exploded in Rashid, 25 kilometres south of Baghdad, police said. In Baghdad, a bomb attack on the car of the director general of the Iraqi health ministry wounded four of his bodyguards Monday morning in eastern Baghdad, a medcial source said.
