IRAQ’S first elected parliament finally broke a bitter political impasse yesterday to elect a Speaker for the multi-ethnic assembly. The breakthrough came, though, as rebels showed that they were still a force to be reckoned with, wounding 44 US soldiers in a full-on attack on Abu Ghraib, the notorious Baghdad prison.

After two months of bickering over the selection of a candidate acceptable to both the Shia and Kurdish election victors, and the disenfranchised Sunnis who spurned the ballots, the transitional national assembly voted in Hachem al-Hassani, a US-trained engineer and Sunni Arab, as the assembly’s first Speaker.

Hussein al-Shahristani, the former nuclear physicist and a prominent member of the triumphant Shia bloc dominated by religious conservatives, said that party whips had ordered MPs to vote for Mr al-Hassani after tough negotiations with the tiny Sunni block in parliament. Mr al-Shahristani, who spent 12 years in prison for refusing to help Saddam Hussein to build nuclear arms, was voted Deputy Speaker.

“We passed the first hurdle,” said Mr al-Hassani, a former industry ministry and a member of the Sunni party of Ghazi al-Yawar, the interim President, which has only five seats. “The Iraqi people have proven that they can overcome the political crisis that has plagued the country for the past two months.”

Public discontent with a lack of government after the January election, in which 8 million Iraqis braved terror attacks to vote freely for the first time in decades, had spilled out in the past week, with posters denouncing the delay and even Shia imams using sermons to speak out against the new leaders.

As party officials congratulated themselves in Baghdad’s heavily guarded convention centre, the sound of a mortar exploding a few hundred yards away echoed through the proceedings. The previous evening a determined assault by as many as 60 guerrillas on the vast Abu Ghraib prison complex, just west of the capital, left 44 American soldiers wounded, as well as a dozen prison inmates. At least six of the American casualties had to be evacuated to hospitals.

The attack started just after dusk on Saturday, when guerrillas detonated two car bombs at opposite corners of the compound, a huge, high-walled fortress once used as a centre for murder and torture by Saddam’s regime.

The guerrillas fired rocket-propelled grenades and small arms at the US troops manning the defences. Lieutenant- Colonel Guy Rudisill, the spokesman for US detention operations, said: “What we had was a well co-ordinated attack of 40 to 60 insurgents on Forward Operating Base Abu Ghraib.” The troops called in Apache helicopter gunships to provide air cover as rebels fired from nearby buildings during a battle that lasted 40 minutes.

Only one guerrilla was reported killed in the assault. US officials were uncertain whether the strike was an attempt to release some of the 3,446 prisoners held in the jail, or whether it was designed to show that the insurgency was still a force to be reckoned with. US casualty figures showed that March was the least deadly month in a year, and the Defence Ministry said Iraqi casualty figures were also down.

Compounding hopes that the insurgency is losing steam, the Association of Muslim Scholars, a hardline Sunni group sympathetic to the guerrillas, called on Sunnis to join the country’s fledgeling security forces to ensure national security.

While greeted with cautious optimism, the weekend statement also banned any collaboration with foreign troops against Iraqis, and appeared to be born out of fears that Shias, who make up the majority in Iraq and who signed up to the military in large numbers, could dominate the armed forces as well as the government.

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