Iraqi tribal leaders meet with al-Maliki

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Car bombs and mortar attacks killed at least 51 people in Baghdad on Saturday as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met with tribal leaders from a Shiite stronghold in an attempt to mend his fractured government.

"The enemies are trying to disperse us, but they will not be able to," said al-Maliki, appearing on state-run Al-Iraqiya television with 65 representatives of the Sadr City slum who reportedly asked al-Maliki for more police to patrol the neighborhood.

Sadr City is the stronghold of anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Thirty legislators and six Cabinet ministers loyal to al-Sadr suspended participation in Parliament and al-Maliki's government on Wednesday to protest al-Maliki's meeting in Amman, Jordan, with President Bush last week.

Even as Saturday's meeting took place, violence spread in the capital and beyond. The Interior Ministry said 44 bodies were discovered in Baghdad during the previous 24 hours, most of them middle-age, shot and stripped of identification — telltale signs of sectarian violence.

More than half a dozen other Iraqis died in clashes across the country. And the U.S. military reported the death of a soldier from the 1st Battalion, 1st Armored Division who had been injured in combat in western Anbar province.

In a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, two car bombs exploded Saturday afternoon in markets about 100 yards apart, according to police Lt. Haitham Kamil. Three mortars followed soon afterward in the same areas, police said.

By nightfall, no one had claimed responsibility for the attacks. Firefighters were still battling flames near the charred remains of numerous victims, a witness said.

U.S. soldiers destroyed two buildings being used by insurgents in a town in Anbar province, killing six militants, two women and a child, the military said today.

Searching through one of the destroyed buildings after Saturday night's raid in Karmah, coalition forces also found a weapons cache the military said. Three suspected insurgents also were detained.

Karmah, 50 miles west of Baghdad, is in Anbar province, the large area of western Iraq where many of the country's Sunni Arab insurgent groups operate.

Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zaubai, a member of the major Sunni legislative bloc, was targeted by gunmen while his convoy was traveling in Ghazaliya, a majority Sunni area of Baghdad, according to police. He was unharmed, police said, but one of his bodyguards was injured.

A rocket also struck near the office of Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of a major Sunni party within al-Zaubai's bloc.

The Sadr City tribal leaders who met with al-Maliki for a half-hour Saturday asked him to hire more local people to police their Baghdad neighborhood, increasing the police force from 1,460 to 7,000 officers, according to Samir Awad, an Iraqi journalist who helped arrange the meeting.

Awad said the tribal leaders also proposed a nationwide meeting of tribal leaders.

Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, a prominent Shiite figure who leads a parliamentary bloc comparable in size to al-Sadr's, spoke out in Jordan against holding an international summit to address Iraq's sectarian divisions. Hakim insisted Iraq's conflicts are political, not sectarian, and can be resolved internally. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan had suggested the meeting.

The Associated Press reported on the raid in Anbar.