BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 10 — The American ambassador to Iraq, seeking to break the deadlock over the formation of a new government, is urging the nation's political leaders to hold a high-level conference somewhere in Iraq to broker a grand coalition, the embassy's spokeswoman said today.
"The ambassador is proposing this idea as a possibility to push forward the formation of a national unity government," said the spokeswoman, Elizabeth O. Colton.
Mr. Khalilzad has taken an active, behind-the-scenes role in Iraq's political process, but talks have calcified in recent days because of disagreements about who should be the next prime minister, the government's top executive.
In a modest indication of forward motion, President Jalal Talabani issued a decree ordering Iraq's new Parliament to convene its first session on March 19, Mr. Talabani's office announced today.
A spokesman for Mr. Talabani, Hiwa Osman, said today that the decree resulted from "long consultations" with all the major political factions and was not expected to be opposed even though sharp differences remained over the composition of the government.
Masoud Barzani, head of the Kurdish regional government, called the political impasse a "crisis." In the spirit of Mr. Khalilzad's conference proposal, which was first published Friday on the Web site of Time magazine, Mr. Barzani issued an invitation to Iraq's political leaders to meet in Kurdistan.
In the deadliest act of violence today, a suicide car bomb exploded at a joint American-Iraqi military checkpoint on the outskirts of Falluja, west of Baghdad, ripping through a line of idling vehicles and killing at least five people, including an American marine, an Iraqi soldier and three members of a family, the American military command said.
In Samarra, where extremists destroyed a holy Shiite shrine on Feb. 22 igniting a rash of sectarian killing, a car bomb exploded in front of a Sunni Arab mosque, killing an imam and wounding two other people, the police said.
An Iraqi government investigation into the abduction on Wednesday of dozens of employees at Al-Rawafid Security Company in Baghdad was continuing with American assistance, an American official said today.
A high-level Interior Ministry official, contrary to an earlier report, said he knew of no ministry investigations into the security company, but said he had been investigating the firm's sole client, the Iraqna cellphone company, for suspected links to the Sunni Arab-led insurgency.
Maj. Gen. Mehdi Sabih Hashem al-Garawi, commander of a paramilitary police unit, said that Iraqi military officials might be investigating Iraqna and, if so, could be looking into the security firm in connection with those investigations.
Spokesmen for Iraqna and its Cairo-based parent company, Orascom Telecom, could not be reached for comment today.
Sheik Muhsin Naif al-Faisal, one of the security firm's owners and a former member of Parliament, said in a telephone interview today that he had not received any information about the condition of his 34 abducted employees and said he was at a loss to explain the raid. "Everything's possible," he said.
Mr. Faisal, who was in London at the time of the raid, said that according to witnesses, the assailants appeared to be Interior Ministry police officials on a routine check of weapons and licenses. It was the third time in 10 weeks the officers had visited the firm, he recalled. The ministry has repeatedly denied any involvement in the raid.
In Spain today, the country's National Court revoked an international arrest warrant for three American soldiers suspected of killing a Spanish journalist in Baghdad during the American invasion in 2003. The court ruled that Spanish authorities lacked jurisdiction in the case because it involved a legitimate act of war against a target "mistakenly identified as the enemy," rather than an intentional effort to kill civilians, according to a court official. The journalist, José Manuel Couso Permuy, a cameraman with the Spanish television station Telecinco, was killed in April 2003 when a shell fired from an American tank struck the Palestine Hotel, where he and about 100 other journalists were staying. Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian-born cameraman with the Reuters news agency, was also killed in the attack.