BAGHDAD - Three US soldiers were killed in Iraq as security forces said they had arrested 120 suspects Saturday on suspicion of planning attacks on the country's Shiite majority ahead of a major religious holiday.
Against the backdrop of increased bloodshed, the country's parliament planned to reconvene Tuesday to elect a speaker as talks between Kurds and Shiites on forming a government foundered.
The latest car bombing against US forces, in the capital's tense southwest, killed two patrolling US soldiers and wounded two others, the US military said.
A marine was killed in action Friday in the restive Al-Anbar province, west of the capital, another statement said, without providing further details.
The latest casualties brought to 1,518 the number of US military personnel killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion over two years ago, according to a Pentagon tally.
Five days before the Shiite religious festival of Arbaeen, Iraqi troops swooped on Jurf al-Sakhr, a Sunni village about 60 kilometers (35 miles) south of Baghdad, located inside the so-called triangle of death.
"We found explosive devices and materials, booby-trapped cars and compact discs showing beheadings," said a defense ministry source.
He said preliminary interrogation of the suspects had revealed that they had a list of clerics targeted for assassination in the mid-Euphrates region, which includes the Shiite shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf.
"Some of them were tasked with attacking pilgrims with small arms fire and roadside bombs and even poisoning their food," the source said.
A spokesman for the Sunni Waqf, or religious endowment, confirmed two Sunni clerics had been rounded up in the raids -- Sheikh Ahmad Abdullah Janabi and Sheikh Adel Jabbar Kassab -- along with 50 of their followers.
Thousands of pilgrims have already started marching to Karbala for the Arbaeen, which falls next Thursday. The pilgrimage procession was hit Friday by three suicide bombings that killed two people and wounded 24.
Arabaeen ends the traditional 40- day mourning period commemorating the death of the Muslim prophet Mohammed's grandson Imam Hussein in 680 AD in the bloody battle of Karbala.
"What we are doing is a duty to show that we are grateful to the huge sacrifices (of Imam Hussein)," said Khalid al-Jashaami, a 32-year-old lawyer, making the journey to Karbala.
Police and national guardsmen were deployed and checkpoints set up along the road in an effort to avoid attacks against the religious faithful.
The long oppressed Shiite majority have suffered some of the worst attacks of the nearly two-year insurgency.
The devastating bombing in Hilla at the end of February killed some 120 people and twin attacks in Baghdad and Karbala during last year's Ashura, the day of Hussein's death, claimed the lives of 180 people.
Two months after the country's landmark elections, in which eight million Iraqis braved insurgent threats to vote, there was still no new government in place.
Parliament, which held its inaugural session on March 16, will reconvene Tuesday and nominate a speaker and his two deputies, even if the political parties cannot break their deadlock on the government, said Jawad al-Maliki, a Shiite negotiator.
Maliki said the top contender to lead the assembly is outgoing President Ghazi al-Yawar, a Sunni Arab tribal leader from northern Iraq. His deputies would be a Shiite and a Kurd, Maliki added.
Some cabinet posts have already been filled and talks now center on a few positions, Maliki added, declining to be more precise.
Kurds and Shiites, who swept January's vote, have been locked in talks since late February that started with such contentious issues as the fate of the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk and the rights of Kurds under a federalist structure.
The crux of the debate now is sharing out cabinet posts. That task has been made more complicated by both sides' desire to include Sunnis, who largely boycotted elections, and the Kurds' wish to temper Islamist influence in the Shiite bloc by including members of the secular alliance of outgoing prime minister Iyad Allawi.
The Kurds and Shiites are also feuding over the post of oil minister.
The thinking on both sides is that if Sunnis are brought in, the insurgency would slowly die out because it is centered in areas dominated by members of this embittered minority favored under Saddam Hussein's ousted regime.
In further violence in the predominantly Sunni Salaheddin province, a civilian was killed and another wounded in a roadside bomb between Tuz and Kirkuk, police said.
In the refinery town of Baiji, the body of an Iraqi contractor kidnapped a week ago was found in the Al-Siniyah area, a police officer said.
A senior member of Saddam's banned Baath party was captured with two other people by US and Iraqi forces in a dawn raid on Al-Mutasim on the eastern side of Samarra, police said.
Diab Khalil al-Samarrai held the rank of branch leader responsible for the region of Balad, north of Baghdad.

03/26/2005 15:10 GMT