Baghdad suicide attack, 20 killed

Baghdad: A bomb tore through in a minibus in a largely Shiite Baghdad neighborhood on Monday, killing at least 20 people and wounding 18.

Gunmen killed at least 10 people, including a television cameraman, a city councilman and a Sunni sheik, in executions and assassinations around Iraq.

General John Abizaid, commander of all US forces in the Middle East, met with the country's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to ''reaffirm President Bush's commitment'' to success in Iraq, the government said.

The two discussed the effects Iran and Syria were having on Iraq's security, according to the Iraqi government statement.

Abizaid was the third top US official to visit Iraq since October 30, and the meeting comes a day after al-Maliki promised to shake up his government in a bid to end the sectarian slaughter.

Amid the violence, two US soldiers were killed Sunday in a roadside bombing in Salahuddin Province north of Baghdad, the military reported on Monday.

In Washington, the blue-ribbon bipartisan commission trying to devise a new course for the war in Iraq was to meet with President Bush and other White House officials. The Iraq Study Group plans to announce its recommendations to Bush and Congress by the end of the year.

The bomb in the northeast Baghdad Shaab neighborhood was planted on the bus and detonated shortly after noon at a major intersection, police said.

Sunni insurgents have frequently targeted Shiite bus passengers in the ongoing sectarian reprisal killings that are tearing at the fabric of Iraqi society.

Hours earlier, Mohammed al-Ban, a cameraman for Iraq's independent Al-Sharqiyah satellite television broadcaster, was gunned down leaving his home in the northern city of Mosul. His wife was wounded, police said.

Al-Ban is the second journalist for the channel to be killed in recent weeks. Anchorwoman Leqaa Abdul Razzaq was fatally shot late last month as she was traveling in south Baghdad's lawless Dora district.

At least 89 journalists have been killed in Iraq since hostilities began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count based on statistics kept by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Another 35 media employees, including drivers, interpreters and guards, have been killed, all but one of them Iraqi.