Baghdad

On his desk sit two thick folders of citizens’ complaints. Before him a roomful of officials are detailing the city’s corruption, anarchy and crumbling infrastructure. Out in the corridor supplicants wait their turn to plead for help. Throughout city hall staff lack education, skills and equipment. Hussein al-Tahaan leans back, takes off his spectacles and rubs his eyes.

Insurgents launched a surprise attack on Baghdad’s heavily guarded interior ministry building early on Monday, killing two police officers and wounding several others, officials said. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein’s lawyers complained they will not have enough time to prepare for his trial, which starts on October 19.

Insurgents killed 19 Iraqi security forces on Saturday in clashes around Baqouba, while United States and Iraqi forces intensified an offensive in a rebel-infested city that the Americans subdued last year — only to have the Iraqis lose control. Eight police officers died in a pair of shootouts in Baqouba, 55km north-east of Baghdad.

More than 630 people died in a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad on Wednesday, following a mortar attack on a Shi’ite shrine in the Iraqi capital. The victims were reported to be Shi’ite pilgrims who had been making their way to the shrine to observe an annual religious ritual. ”I was trying to pick up the children but was swept off my feet,” said one pilgrim.

While the health situation for Iraqi children remains perilous, reports from the ministry of health and environment indicate that the past year has witnessed an important drop in rates of disease among children under five, particularly for cholera and diarrhoea.

A radical Shi’ite cleric called on his followers on Thursday to end clashes with Shi’ite rivals so that stalled talks on a new Constitution can proceed. Clashes continued for a second day after the cleric’s office in Najaf was burned and four of his supporters were killed.

Iraq’s ruling coalition submitted a new Constitution to Parliament on Monday night but delayed a vote for three days to try to win over Sunni Arabs who said it could lead to civil war. Shia and Kurdish leaders said they had reached a compromise between themselves and delivered a thinly veiled ultimatum to the Sunni minority to sign up to the deal by Thursday or retreat deeper into the political wilderness.

Iraq’s much-awaited draft Constitution is ready and will be presented to Parliament later on Monday, top Shi’ite negotiator Jawad al-Maliki said. Negotiations on Iraq’s first post-Saddam Hussein Constitution have been dogged for weeks by thorny issues revolving around federalism, sharing of oil revenues and the role of Islam in lawmaking.

Two car bombs turned a Baghdad bus station into a slaughterhouse on Wednesday and a third bomb ambushed emergency services, killing at least 38 people and wounding dozens. The coordinated strikes during the morning rush hour shattered a relative lull in the violence and were intended to maximise sectarian tension.

A day after failing to meet their deadline, Iraqi leaders expressed confidence on Tuesday that they will overcome differences over key issues such as the role of Islam and the power of regional governments and finish the new Constitution by next week. Negotiators now have until August 22 to try to draft the charter.

At least 22 people were killed, many of them security personnel, in a series of rebel attacks, including a car bomb, across Iraq on Tuesday, police and interior ministry officials said. Three Iraqis were killed and 32 wounded when a suicide bomber blew up a car in central Baghdad, an interior ministry official said.

Hassan Feiraz, a 16-year-old boy, has started a desperate new life since being forced into the sex trade in Baghdad, joining a growing number of adolescents soliciting in Iraq under the threat of street gangs or the force of poverty. ”My life is a disaster today. I could be killed by my family to restore their honour,” he says.

They have never seen Juba. They hear him, but by then it’s too late: a shot rings out and another US soldier slumps dead or wounded. There is never a follow-up shot, never a chance for US forces to identify the origin, to make the hunter the hunted. He fires once and vanishes.

Women from different Iraqi rights groups met on Monday to issue a list of demands they believe will guarantee women’s rights in the country’s new Constitution. The informal group issued a six-point statement demanding, among others, that Islamic law, or sharia, is not one of the sources of the Constitution.

At least 40 people were killed and 57 wounded in a suicide bomb attack on an army recruitment centre in the northern Iraqi town of Rabia, according to the latest toll issued by police on Saturday. An earlier toll put the number of dead at 25 and those wounded at 35 in the Friday blast.

The vetting of recruits to Iraq’s police force is so poor that many who join up have criminal records, are barely literate, or are members of the insurgency, a new United States government report has concluded. The report said that while training for the new Iraqi police force had improved, there were still a number of serious problems.

Up to 40 people were killed on Sunday in a suicide bombing in Baghdad as violence continued to undermine efforts to draft Iraq’s first Constitution. The United States military said a suicide bomber had driven a truck loaded with explosives into a police station in eastern Baghdad. Most of the victims were thought to be civilians.

A suicide truck bomber struck on Sunday outside a police station in Baghdad, killing at least 40 people, the United States military said. Television pictures showed a deep crater in the road outside the Rashad police station in the New Baghdad neighbourhood in the east of the capital, as ambulances and fire fighters attended the scene.