U.S. soldiers are inflicted with daily attacks

BAGHDAD, July 7 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Two U.S. soldiers and two Iraqis were killed in two separate attacks in the Iraqi capital Baghdad overnight, as another American soldier shot a day earlier died of his wounds, the U.S. military said Monday, July 7.

One soldier was shot dead while a patrol was pursuing two Iraqi gunmen, one of whom was shot dead in Al-Azamiya neighborhood, Corporal Tod Pruden told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The other soldier was killed in a separate attack as a homemade bomb hit his vehicle during a patrol of the Kadhamiyah neighborhood in the north of the capital.

Three U.S. soldiers have been killed during the last 24 hours, as anti-American sentiments are on the rise among local inhabitants furious over the lack of security and basic services and the U.S. military provocations.

On Sunday, July 6, a U.S. soldier died of his wounds after being shot point-blank in Baghdad.

The soldier was guarding the university campus in the centre of the city when he was shot in the head, a U.S. military spokeswoman said.

A British freelance journalist was shot dead by unknown assailants in a similar style on Saturday, July 5, in the first killing of a reporter in Iraq since the United States declared the end of its war here at the beginning of May 2003.

He was apparently carrying nothing to indicate that he was a reporter, the BBC NewsOnline reported.

The Monday shootings followed a rocket-propelled grenade attack in the Iraqi town of Ramadi west of Baghdad late on Sunday, when assailants fired at a U.S. patrol, injuring four U.S. soldiers, Pruden said.

"One Iraqi (attacker) was killed as a result and one Iraqi was wounded," he said. He did not know the extent of the injuries to the Americans.

Powerful explosions were heard in the town located 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Baghdad, witnesses said.

Sixty-eight other U.S. troops have died in Iraq since May 1, the Pentagon said, adding that at least 27 have been combat deaths.

Kurdistan Meeting

Meanwhile, representatives of major Iraqi political groups will gather in the Kurdish-held north Monday to discuss plans by the U.S.-led administration for an interim governing body, a Kurdish official said late Sunday.

Members of a seven-strong "leadership council" comprising the main parties that opposed ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein will meet in northern Iraq in territory controlled by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), he said.

Delegates had already started to arrive in Salahaddin, north of Arbil, from Baghdad, the KDP official added.

The KDP and the other main Kurdish party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), are members of the council, which also includes the Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC) and the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), the country's main Shiite Muslim group.

Other members are the Iraqi National Accord Movement, the Shiite Dawa party, and Nasseer al-Chaderchi, a Sunni Muslim representative.

According to U.N. special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, U.S. administrator Paul Bremer will unveil in the next two weeks a "transitory governing council with real executive powers", in a departure from earlier plans to give the interim body a strictly advisory role.

Bremer had told the main Iraqi political groups on June 1 that a future Iraqi interim body, to be set up by mid-July, would be led by a 25- to 30-strong political council that would name "key advisors" to government ministries and offer advice to Bremer.

The interim body would work in parallel with a separate, much larger convention that would draw up a new Iraqi constitution.

But the plan had sparked the ire of former opposition leaders who were eager to take the reins of power in the new Iraq after 23 years yoke of Saddam.

The U.S. administration also has plans for a seven- to 10- member constitutional commission, which will hold consultations with all sectors of society.

It would then return within two to three months with ideas for a constitution to be presented to the transitional council.

The council could then elect a constitutional assembly that would draft a constitutional text to be put to a referendum, Vieira de Mello said Sunday.

Sources close to the groups meeting in Salahaddin said they would try to agree on a future president of the proposed governing council, as well as discussing its membership.

Iraqis had earlier hit out at a U.S. decision to halt local elections in provisional cities and towns across Iraq, saying that the U.S. did not honor anew its pre-war promises of bringing greater freedom and democracy to their country,