Baghdad - Iraqi insurgents set off bombs and fired rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons at military convoys, checkpoints and police patrols, in a spree of violence yesterday that left 33 people dead and dozens wounded.

Al Qaeda in Iraq purportedly claimed responsibility in an Internet statement for much of the bloodshed in and around Baquba, 60 kilometres (35 miles) northeast of Baghdad, where 15 people died.

Another car bomb killed 12 people in Balad, southeast of Baquba.

In Baghdad, gunmen killed two police officers and wounded a third, while two civilians were also killed when a roadside bomb targeting a joint U.S.-Iraqi military convoy exploded in the west Baghdad neighbourhood of Amiriyah.

In Baghdad's southern Doura district, gunmen killed Mahmood Khudier, a former Iraqi army officer, while a man was killed in a mortar attack in Qaim, near the Syrian border, hospital and police officials said.

Shiite and Kurdish politicians met in Baghdad yesterday to hammer out what appeared a final power-sharing deal.

Kurdish demands include an autonomous Kurdistan as part of federal Iraq and a share of region's oil revenues. They also want to maintain their peshmerga militia and want a bigger share of the national budget.

Their demand for a federal state requires redrawing their state borders to include Kurdish areas - oil-rich Kirkuk among them - that were dominated by Saddam loyalists and Sunni Arabs.

Fuad Masoum, a member of the Kurdish coalition, who served as head of the Iraq's former National Council said that Kurdish representatives met with alliance officials Adel Abdul-Mahdi and Abu Isra Al Maliky and “we are trying to solve everything before March 16.”

The day was chosen because it marks the anniversary of the 1988 Saddam-ordered chemical attack on the northern Kurdish town of Halabja, which killed 5,000 people.

Saleh, the deputy prime minister, said the Kurds also “will not accept the creation of fundamentalist, sectarian state in Iraq. That will not be acceptable for Iraq which needs to develop toward a federal democracy that will be inclusive for all communities in Iraq.”

But alliance officials, including Ali Al Dabbagh, told reporters at the home of Iraqi National Congress Leader Ahmad Chalabi, that a deal had not yet been struck.

“We are negotiating the main principles with the Kurds, we haven't gotten to the details yet,” Al Dabbagh said.