IRAQ: Iraq's prime minister-designate said yesterday he was close to forming a government that would end five months of stalemate marked by a lurch to civil war.
But senior negotiators said there was much hard bargaining left before Nuri al-Maliki could present to parliament the sort of national unity coalition he and the US hope can drag the nation back from sectarian conflict.
A suicide car bomber killed 17 people and wounded 35 at a market in the northern city of Tal Afar, recently held up by President Bush as an example of progress being made in freeing Iraq from violence by al-Qaeda and other guerrillas.
It was one of the worst attacks of recent weeks and came after the US military published what it said was new evidence of despondency among Sunni rebels, in the form of a supposedly captured al-Qaeda document detailing their setbacks in Baghdad.
Also yesterday, 11 bodies, nine of them beheaded, were retrieved from the Tigris river south of Baghdad. One was that of a 10-year-old boy.
Mr Maliki, a Shia Islamist whose nomination ended months of factional deadlock, has another two weeks to name a cabinet but said he might do so "today or tomorrow".
"We have achieved much and there is little left to do," he told a news conference. "We have done 90 per cent."