The newly elected Iraqi parliament reached agreement on Tuesday to elect the country's new president and vice presidents, in a key step toward building a new government, as insurgents stepped up attacks against US troops.

Leaders of the main political blocs said they have reached agreement to elect veteran Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani as president on Wednesday, followed by Shiite leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister on Tuesday.

The two vice presidents will be Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite who served as finance minister in the outgoing government, and Sunni Arab leader Ghazi Yawar, the previous president, according to politicians.

Meanwhile, outgoing Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said an agreement on the new cabinet to be led by Ibrahim al-Jafaari was also largely complete and that the new government would be approved "within a few days."

The Islamist-led Shiite alliance and the Kurdish coalition have been arguing over the makeup of the new government for weeks. They have also been trying to include representatives of the Sunni Arab minority in the new cabinet.

The Sunni Arabs, who stayed away from the Jan. 30 elections, only hold 17 seats in the 275-member parliament. Zebari said the Sunnis would also get the post of defense minister, but he declined to give more details.

Meanwhile, insurgents stepped up their attacks against Iraqis along with US troops.

Two members of the Iraqi national guard were killed on Monday night in a mortar attack on a checkpoint in the town of Dowr, police said on Tuesday.

"A mortar round landed last night on a checkpoint manned by the Iraqi national guard, on the main road to Samarra, south of Dowr town," said a statement issued by the joint office of US and Iraqi forces in Tikrit.

The Iraqi soldiers chased two suspected cars, searching several houses in the area, and detaining five people who were later freed after being interrogated, the statement said.

Four more US service men were reported killed Monday and Tuesday.

On Monday, a blast in the western province of Anbar killed one Marine, while two US soldiers and one Iraqi soldier died in a joint attack on dozens of insurgents in eastern Diyala province.

Another US soldier was killed Tuesday in Baghdad when an abandoned taxi exploded on an expressway near a US patrol. Four others were wounded.

In other attacks targeting Iraqis, a senior Interior Ministry official was reportedly kidnapped by gunmen who broke into his house in Baghdad on Tuesday.

Sunni cleric Hilal Karim was killed in a drive-by shooting as he was entering his mosque in the New Baghdad neighborhood of the capital.

In Hillah, a member of the Babil provincial council, Salim Hilal, was gunned down on his way to work, Babil provincial police spokesman Muthana Khalid said.

(Xinhua News Agency April 6, 2005)