Iraq Puts Civilian Toll at 12,000

Jabr denied that the police operation in Baghdad was unduly focusing on Sunnis, saying many of the operation's commanders were Sunnis.

He also said the new government was trying to reform the Interior Ministry, including expelling officials and officers found to have tortured detainees or others.

As an opposition member under Hussein, he said, he had lost 10 members of his family to torture. "I would not accept that anyone practice torture against anyone," he said, adding that he would "personally follow up" on all such allegations.

Jabr also denied reports that members of the Badr militia, Shiite fighters trained in exile in Iran, were complicit in the killing of Sunni clerics last month. Investigation showed that no Badr members were involved, he said. The true killers are "terrorists who are killing Shiite clerics and Sunnis to incite strife," he said.

The day's violence included two car bombs near the northern oil city of Kirkuk.

A bomb attack at a roadside restaurant apparently targeted bodyguards of one of Iraq's deputy prime ministers, Rosh Nouri Shaways, said Col. Abbas Mohammed Amin, police chief of Tuz, where the attack occurred. Shaways, an ethnic Kurd, was not present, but five of his guards and seven other people were killed, according to police and defense officials.

Two more people died at Arafah, the site of one of Iraq's first oil wells. A suicide car bomber there detonated his explosives at the entrance to a compound for the national oil company and the U.S. and British consulates, Lt. Col. Adel Zain Abidin said.

In Baqubah, in central Iraq, a suicide car bomber killed Hussein Alwan Tamimi, the deputy chairman of the Diyala provincial council, as he was accompanying his ill sister to the hospital, according to a fellow council member, Khadija Khuda Yakhsh. Four of the official's bodyguards also died. The sister was wounded.

In Mosul, also in the north, attackers blew up two motorcycles rigged with explosives next to a coffee shop frequented by police officers, killing five people, the Associated Press reported.

Gunmen firing randomly from three speeding cars killed nine Iraqis in a crowded market area in Baghdad, a Defense Ministry official told the AP. Interior Ministry officials gave a slightly different account, saying the victims had been waiting at a bus stop.

A bomb caused the deaths of three motorists at Mahmudiyah, 15 miles south of Baghdad, and attackers with guns and a bomb killed a woman in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood, police and hospital officials told the AP.

In political developments, negotiators were unable to find a formula by which more Sunni Arabs would help draft the country's constitution.

Writing a new constitution is the main mandate of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari's government, which faces a mid-August deadline to finish a draft that can be put before voters.

Sunnis largely boycotted Jan. 30 elections for the National Assembly and as a result are underrepresented on the constitution-writing committee. Sunni blocs came forward for the first time last month to say that they wanted a role.

The drafting of the charter has started while negotiators decide whether political parties, regional votes or other means should be used to pick Sunni delegates.

"National Assembly members are willing to make this succeed," a Sunni negotiator, Salih Mutlak, said after talks Thursday.

"They cannot write the constitution in the absence of the Sunni representation," he added. "If they do, it will be rejected by the people."

Special correspondents Salih Saif Aldin in central Iraq, Marwan Ani in Kirkuk and Bassam Sebti and Khalid Saffar in Baghdad contributed to this report.