Iraq PM warns Sunni protesters

Iraqi authorities said that five people have been killed in a string of attacks across the country.

Police officials say that in the first attack, gunmen early Wednesday fatally shot a policeman and his brother who is a member of anti-al-Qaida group north of Baghdad.                                
In the western province of Anbar, a car bomb targeting the house of a police colonel in Fallujah killed the officer's neighbor but left the colonel unharmed.                                      

Another car bomb struck a group of Shiite pilgrims heading to the holy city of Karbala, killing two people.                 

Hospital officials confirmed the causalities. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk to the media.                   

Violence has ebbed in Iraq, but insurgent attacks are still frequent.               

Separately, Iraq's Parliament Speaker Osama Najafi called for an extraordinary parliamentary session next Sunday to discuss the political crisis sweeping through the country, urging all MPs to attend it.

This call came in the wake of a series of protests and sit-ins that are being held in the provinces of al-Anbar, Ninawa and Salaheddine for 10 days now to call for the release of prisoners.

In turn, Iraq's Shi'ite prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has warned he will not tolerate Sunni anti-government rallies indefinitely, but made a concession to their demands by promising to free some women prisoners.

Thousands of Sunnis have been taking to the streets of Iraq for more than a week in protest against Maliki, whom they accuse of discriminating against their sect and being under the sway of their non-Arab Shi'ite neighbor Iran.

The incident has once more threatened to plunge a delicate power-sharing deal into turmoil, just as President Jalal Talabani, a moderating influence, is in Germany for medical care after suffering a stroke. The cradle of the protests is Anbar province, a Sunni stronghold in western Iraq, where demonstrators are blocking a key highway to Jordan and Syria.


AP/LBCI/REUTERS