Insurgents killed a Kurdish member of Iraqi parliament, his brother and the driver of his car and wounded a second lawmaker in an ambush on their convoy north of Baghdad, officials said Sunday.

Militiamen of the Mahdi Army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr barricaded streets in central Basra, demanding the release of one of their commanders before the day was out.

"The terrorists have launched a war of aggression against all Iraqis (but) we are up to it," Hussein Al-Shahristani, the National Assembly's deputy speaker, said Sunday as lawmakers held a minute of silence for Faris Nasir Hussein, the member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party killed in the ambush late Saturday about 80 kilometers north of Baghdad.

Hussein's brother and their driver also died. Another Kurdish legislator, Haidar Shanoun, who was in the convoy heading from Kurdistan for a session of parliament in Baghdad was injured in the attack.

The attack on the lawmakers came after four days of bloodshed in Baghdad and throughout Iraq in which more than 250 people died.

Meanwhile, the US military said a soldier was killed by a roadside bomb while on patrol in western Iraq. The soldier, assigned to the 56th Brigade Combat Team, was taken to a US military hospital where he died of his wounds Saturday night. The attack occurred near Al Asad Air Base in a volatile insurgent region near Syria.

The death raises to at least 1,899 members of the US military who have been killed since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

The latest violence coincided with a declaration by the al-Qaida in Iraq militant group Wednesday threatening all-out war on the country's Shiite majority .

Shiites have suffered the brunt of a massive campaign of bombing and shooting attacks, which al-Zarqawi said would continue. But the indiscriminate bombings prompted Islamic clerics from both the Sunni and Shiite sects to call for an end to the killing of innocent people.

In Iraq's second-largest city of Basra, about 200 militiamen brandished automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades at roadblocks, demanding the provincial governor order the immediate release of Sheikh Ahmed Fartosi, the Mahdi Army commander.

The local commander was arrested by British and Iraqi forces Friday. He is accused of launching raids against security forces in the city, police said.

Last year, the Mahdi Army fought US and coalition forces in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. The fighting ended after al-Sadr accepted a peace agreement negotiated by the Shiite clerical hierarchy.

On Baghdad's southern outskirts, a bomb exploded beneath a rail line damaging a freight train carrying oil for the refinery of Dora. A plume of black smoke rose from the burning tankers, but police said the blast caused no casualties.

Also Sunday in Baghdad's eastern district of Rashad, police said they found the handcuffed bodies of four unidentified men who had been shot to death.

(Shenzhen Daily via agencies September 19, 2005)