(AP)
Updated: 2007-08-07 20:15

The Allawi bloc, a mixture of Sunnis and Shiites, cited al-Maliki's failure to respond to its demands for political reform. The top Sunni political bloc already had pulled its six ministers from the 40-member Cabinet of al-Maliki, a Shiite, last week.

"This decision is a bid to apply political pressure for reforming the political process that is headed in the wrong direction," bloc spokesman Ayad Jamaluddin said Tuesday at a news conference.

He declined to give a deadline but said the bloc's demands included reconsidering efforts to revise legislation to bring thousands of former Saddam Hussein era party officials back into the government and preventing the infiltration of security forces by extremists.

The ministers intend to continue overseeing their ministries.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who has been trying to broker the Sunni bloc's return in a bid to hold the government together, met Monday with Crocker and a White House envoy.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States was working well with the al-Maliki government, but he did not give the kind of enthusiastic endorsement that President Bush and his aides once did.

"There's a very healthy political debate that is going on in Iraq, and that is good," McCormack said. "It's going to be for them (the Iraqi people) to make the judgments about whether or not that government is performing."

Lawmaker Hussam al-Azawi, of the bloc loyal to Allawi, said the boycott began with Monday's Cabinet meeting.

"We demanded broader political participation by all Iraqis to achieve real national reconciliation ... and an end to sectarian favoritism," al-Azawi said.

In Tal Afar to the north, residents of the religiously mixed city faced a curfew after a suicide bomber slammed his truck into a crowded Shiite neighborhood on Monday. The blast killed at least 28 people, including at least 19 children, according to Brig. Gen. Najim Abdullah, who said the dump truck was filled with explosives and covered with a layer of gravel.

Houses collapsed as many families were getting ready for the day ahead.

Several residents said boys and girls were playing hopscotch and marbles outside the houses at the time of the explosion.

"This is an ugly crime. I cannot understand how the insurgents did not think about these children," said one man, Kahlil Atta, a wedding photographer in the city.

Tal Afar, which was cited by Bush last March as a success story after major military operations against insurgents, has been the frequent site of Sunni extremist attacks in the past year.

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