3 US troops among 25 killed in Iraq
Foreign Desk Report

BAQUBA (Iraq)—A car bomb exploded in a crowded small town northeast of Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least 25 people and wounding 40 more, police sources said.
The blast hit the Shi’ite town of Howaider, which is north of the provincial capital Baquba, around sundown when people would have been breaking the Ramadan fast. The Iraqi government and its US backers are battling an insurgency with attacks blamed on a variety of groups including al Qaeda in Iraq.
Police sources said the bomb was in a pick-up truck which exploded on the small town’s main street where the mosque, the market and a coffee shop are located.
The blast came the day after a deadline for parties to register for December 15 elections that Washington is hoping will set Iraq firmly on the path to peace and democracy, two and a half years after the US-led invasion.
It also comes at the end of a week which saw the United States mark the 2,000th US military fatality in Iraq. Insurgents used a land mine and a roadside bomb to kill three US Army soldiers and wound four on Saturday in attacks that brought to eight the number of American service members who have died in the last three days.
In Baghdad, the campaign for Iraq’s Dec. 15 parliamentary election effectively began as several of the 18 coalitions scheduled news conferences to unveil their tickets.
On Friday, the deadline for candidates to file, a Sunni Arab coalition submitted its list of names, signaling greater Sunni participation in a process Washington hopes will help speed the day when US troops can go home.
New information also emerged Saturday about a triple suicide vehicle attack that occurred near the Palestine Hotel complex in Baghdad where many foreign journalists work. The well-coordinated attack killed 17 Iraqis on Monday and wounded several reporters.
The US military said that one of its soldiers guarding the complex killed the suicide bomber who managed to penetrate the complex before he could reach the entrance of the building and set off his explosives. “He was trying to kill people,” said the soldier, Spc. Darrell Green. “It was good we stopped him because he would have killed more people and destroyed the building”.
The land mine that killed an US soldier and wounded four occurred early Saturday near Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, the military said. Two other US Army soldiers died in south Baghdad on Saturday when their patrol struck a roadside bomb, the military said. On Friday, the US command announced that five other American service members were killed in Iraq the day before.
The eight deaths raised to 2,015 the number of members of the US military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003.
The December election follows the Oct. 15 ratification of the new constitution, which many Sunni Arabs opposed. Voters will choose a 275-member assembly to serve for four years. It will be the first full-term parliament in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed after the US-led invasion of 2003.
The decision by a Sunni coalition to participate and the presence of prominent Sunnis on other tickets indicated that many members of the community, which forms the core of the insurgency, have not abandoned the political process.
Political battle lines, in fact, have been drawn as before along ethnic and religious lines, a development that complicates nation-building in this factious, war-ravaged country of 27 million people.