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Iraqi Official Says Insurgent Cell Bombed Shiite Shrine
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"They should be executed in a public square so that they become a lesson to those who violate the sacred places of the Muslims," said Ahmed Hussein, 50, a Samarra lawyer.
Meanwhile, news services reported that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had been contacted by several Sunni Arab insurgent groups about his proposal to end violence by bringing them into the Iraqi political process. The Associated Press said nearly a dozen insurgent groups had agreed to immediately halt attacks on all foreign or Iraqi targets if the United States agreed to withdraw foreign forces within two years.
Maliki has said, however, that amnesty offers included in his recent reconciliation proposal did not extend to killers of Americans or Iraqis, and the Bush administration has rejected setting a timetable for troop withdrawals. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Washington that President Bush's view "has been and remains that a timetable is not something that is useful. It is a signal to the enemies that all you have to do is just wait and it's yours."
The daily violence in Iraq continued on Wednesday. A dark blue Daewoo parked outside a Sunni Mosque in Baqubah exploded, killing two people and wounding 12 others, many of them customers at a tea shop across the street, according to Laith Salan, the senior emergency room physician at Baqubah General Hospital.
The U.S. military said that a soldier was killed on Tuesday night when a roadside bomb exploded under his vehicle. A U.S. Marine was killed Tuesday in fighting in predominantly Sunni Anbar province. U.S. and Iraqi forces have been operating in the provincial capital of Ramadi in an attempt to wrest control from insurgents.
In Baqubah, an al-Qaeda insurgent was detained during a raid in which troops mistakenly killed a neighbor who was "acting suspiciously" but turned out to be a noncombatant, the military said.
Special correspondents Hassan Shammari, K.I. Ibrahim and Saad al-Izzi and other Washington Post staff contributed to this report.
