IRAQ \ Developments

The latest developments in Iraq:
An influential retired Army general released a dire assessment of the situation in Iraq, based on a recent round of meetings there with Gen. David Petraeus and 16 other senior U.S. commanders. "The population is in despair," retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey wrote in an eight-page document compiled in his capacity as a professor at West Point. "Life in many of the urban areas is now desperate."
Two truck bombs shattered markets in Tal Afar on Tuesday, killing at least 63 people and wounding dozens in the second assault in four days on a predominantly Shiite Muslim city hit by a resurgence in violence a year after it was held up as a symbol of U.S. success. After the bombings, suspected Sunni insurgents tried to ambush ambulances carrying the injured out of the northwestern city but were driven off by police gunfire, Iraqi authorities said.
In Baghdad, a U.S. soldier and an American working as a U.S. government contractor were killed by a rocket attack on the heavily guarded Green Zone, U.S. officials said. Another contract worker suffered serious wounds, and three were slightly wounded. A soldier also was wounded.
U.S. soldiers foiled two suicide truck bombers trying to attack their base in a small town 50 miles west of Baghdad and killed as many as 15 attackers, the military said. It said eight soldiers suffered wounds, all but one of them slight, during the firefight in Karmah.
A military leader of the 1920 Revolution Brigades, a major Sunni Arab insurgent group, was killed Tuesday west of Baghdad, the group announced in an Internet statement. A local official confirmed the death of Harith Dhaher al-Dhari, saying he died when rocket-propelled grenades hit his car and an accompanying vehicle in the Abu Ghraib district.
Iraqi police reported at least 109 people killed or found dead nationwide. The toll included two elderly sisters -- both Chaldean Catholic nuns in the increasingly tense city of Kirkuk -- who were stabbed multiple times in what appeared to be a sectarian killing.
Source: Combined dispatches