WAR DEVELOPMENTS

WASHINGTON

> Army Secretary Pete Geren said Monday he will not stay on as head of the nation’s largest military service once the Obama administration moves to Washington. The change won’t be immediate, though. Geren said he has been “asked and have agreed to stay on as secretary until my successor is confirmed.”

IRAQ

> Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki tried Monday to undermine the popularity of the Iraqi who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush, saying the journalist confessed that the mastermind of the attack was a militant known for slitting his victims’ throats. The alleged instigator was not named, and the journalist’s family denied the claim. Al-Zeidi’s brother Uday said he met the journalist in prison and that he had expressed no regret for throwing the shoes “and that he would do it again.”

> A simmering dispute between the Iraqi parliament’s abrasive, erratic Sunni speaker and Kurdish and Shiite lawmakers flared again Monday. After unsuccessfully trying to vote Mahmoud al-Mashhadani out of office, his foes gave him until Tuesday to resign or face another ouster. Parliament then adjourned without voting on a measure that would allow non-U.S. troops to remain in the country past the end of the year.

> The Italian auto company Fiat Group agreed Monday to pay $7 million in fines to settle U.S. Justice Department corruption charges that its subsidiaries bribed Iraqi officials under Saddam Hussein between 2000 and 2002 in exchange for contracts funded by the United Nations under its Oil-for-Food program.

> The U.N. Security Council voted Monday to maintain U.N. protection for billions of dollars of Iraqi assets against seizure by governments, companies or individuals as a result of legal judgments dating back to Saddam Hussein’s 23-year rule. The action continues those protections until Dec. 31, 2009.

AFGHANISTAN

> A joint U.S.-Afghan operation along the border with Pakistan has killed about 20 insurgent fighters over the last month, Kunar province Gov. Sayed Fazeullah Wahidi said Monday. Pakistani forces are conducting a coordinated operation across the border in the Bajur tribal region, he said.

> Two suicide attackers exploded a car bomb Monday near an Afghan governor’s compound in Ghazni province in central Afghanistan, killing one Afghan civilian and wounding seven, in addition to the two attackers.

PAKISTAN

> Suspected U.S. missile strikes killed eight people Monday in the South Waziristan tribal area in northwest Pakistan, where al-Qaida and Taliban leaders are believed hiding, officials and witnesses said. The identities of those killed in the two attacks —- the latest in a stepped-up American campaign in the lawless region close to the Afghan border —- were not immediately known.

> The Pakistani government said an al-Qaida-linked terror group was suspected of helping carry out the September suicide attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad that killed more than 50 people. Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik’s charge against Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was the first time Pakistan has blamed a specific group for the bombing.

> The Interior Ministry said an investigation has been launched into the theft of a large cache of weapons seized after last year’s army assault on the Red Mosque in Islamabad in July 2007, which left scores of occupying militants dead. Shahidullah Baig said 10 police officials, including the head of the police station where the weapons were stored, had been arrested.