Iraq's Parliament recesses without progress

BAGHDAD — Legislators joked and chatted, showing no sense of urgency about breaking a deadlock between Sunni and Shiite Muslims over national reconciliation as Iraq's Parliament held its final session Monday before a monthlong recess.

Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani closed the final three-hour session without a quorum present and declared lawmakers would not reconvene until Sept. 4. That date is just 11 days before the top U.S. military and political officials in Iraq must report to Congress on American progress in taming violence and organizing conditions for sectarian reconciliation.

In another development, a consortium of aid agencies concluded in a report released Monday that living conditions in Iraq have deteriorated significantly since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, leaving nearly one-third of the population in need of emergency aid.

Seventy percent of Iraqi residents lack adequate water supplies, compared with 50 percent in 2003, while more than 4 million people have been displaced during that time, according to the report by Britain-based Oxfam International and other relief agencies. Yet funding for humanitarian assistance in Iraq has declined precipitously, from $453 million in 2005 to $95 million in 2006.

Parliament had extended its session for a month in an unsuccessful attempt to pass legislation the U.S. Congress has designated benchmarks for Iraq's progress on healing its sectarian divide.

Four weeks later, Iraq's politics appear as acrimonious as ever. The 44-seat Sunni political bloc Tawafuq was boycotting the government and threatening to pull its six members from the Cabinet permanently if its demands were not met by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, on the dissolution of militias and detainees' release.

Parliament member Wael Abdul Latif, who is also a judge, lamented the body's seeming irrelevance, pointing out the failure of any important Iraqi leaders, who head political blocs, to come to the assembly, including his own party leader, Ayad Allawi, and Shiite luminaries like Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

Latif said decisions are being made in the "shadowy corners."

Nothing was more contentious than the oil law, which elicited an outcry from moderate Sunnis for giving too much control to the Kurds over signing contracts in northern Iraq with international corporations. Some Shiites and more nationalist Sunnis also were opposed.

In violence Monday, a minibus blew up by Tayaran square in central Baghdad, killing at least six people.

A total of 42 Iraqis were killed or found dead nationwide, according to police, hospital and morgue officials.

A Marine was killed Monday in fighting in the Anbar province west of Baghdad, the military said. Three U.S. soldiers were killed fighting in Anbar on Thursday. At least 3,652 members of the U.S. military have died since the war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Information from The Associated Press and The Washington Post is included in this report.