Senior US officials have warned that attacks against new Iraqi officials will continue and Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged to do everything they could to defeat this insurgency.
In a television interview amid a new spate of assassinations in Iraq, Mr Powell acknowledged the difficulty of protecting the new leaders who are set to take over on 30 June.
Mr Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice spoke in separate US television interviews as a suicide car bomber killed up to seven Iraqis near a US-Iraqi base in Baghdad.
Earlier, a senior official in Iraq's education ministry was shot and fatally wounded in Baghdad. Kamal Jarrah, the director of cultural relations at Iraq's culture ministry, was gunned down in front of his home in the west of the capital as he left for work.
It was the second assassination of a top government official in as many days.
Kamal al-Jarrah, 63, was attacked by gunmen as he left his house in western Baghdad and died later in the city's Yarmuk Hospital.
