Other developments in Iraq 1/6/04

Three U.S. soldiers were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. military convoy west of Baghdad, and insurgents shot and wounded another soldier in an ambush northwest of the capital, the military said Monday.

In London, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said British forces would likely remain in the country for years to come. He said he could not give an "exact timescale" for their withdrawal but added "it is not going to be months. ... I can't say whether it is going to be 2006, 2007."

In northern Iraq, a roadside bomb killed an Iraqi man Monday and wounded three others outside the city of Kirkuk, said Iraqi police Lt. Abdel Salam Zangana. Such bombs are a favored weapon of Iraqi guerrillas, and Zangana said he believed the bomb was intended for U.S. soldiers but detonated early.

Gunmen wounded Mohammed al-Jawadi, a lawyer appointed by the U.S.-led coalition, and his son in the northern city of Mosul on Monday morning, witnesses said. Sources at the local hospital said al-Jawadi, the general prosecutor of a newly established court to fight corruption, was in critical condition, but his son's life was not in danger.

In Washington, meanwhile, State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said Monday that whether the Kurdish regions of Iraq remain semiautonomous as part of a newly sovereign Iraq will be decided by the Iraqi people. "This is not a decision for the Bush administration. We've said all along that it's up to the Iraqi people to determine their political future," Ereli said.

The U.S. Army discharged three soldiers for abusing prisoners at a detention center in Iraq, a U.S. military spokesman said Monday. The three soldiers, all from Pennsylvania, were scheduled to face courts-martial this month but opted instead to submit to a nonjudicial hearing, in which their conduct was judged by a commander without a jury, Lt. Col. Vic Harris said. Such hearings are common practice, he said.

-- The Associated Press