London - The British government is to hold an independent comprehensive inquiry into the planning and conduct of the Iraq war once the bulk of combat troops have come home by the end of July, Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced Wednesday.

A full inquiry would be set up "as soon as practical" after July 31 when British troop levels will have been reduced to 400 from the current 4,100 troops still stationed in southern Iraq.

Baghdad  - Three children were killed on Wednesday when a bomb planted in a rubbish bin near a school in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul exploded as students were leaving classes in the afternoon.

Their deaths brought the number of civilians killed by insurgents in the city on Wednesday to five, medics and police said.

Baghdad  - Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallim arrived in the Iraqi capital on Wednesday, the latest in a series of diplomatic visits to the country following US pledges to withdraw its troops.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki welcomed al-Muallim at the airport ahead of talks on issues of "mutual and regional importance", Syria's official SANA news agency reported Wednesday.

Baghdad  - A man belonging to the minority Yezidi religious sect was killed in northern Iraq, the Voices of Iraq agency reported Wednesday.

The body of the man was found in a field in the northern province of Nineveh, an area where in recent years numerous Christians and members of other religious minorities in Iraq had been killed by Islamic extremists.

Arbil, Iraq - The prime minister of northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region on Wednesday blasted the Iraqi petroleum minister for his "failed" policies.

Speaking to reporters at the airport in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil on Wednesday on his return from Baghdad, Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan Region, said Iraqi Petroleum Minister Hussein al-Shahristani's "failed policies" were responsible for the problems in the Iraqi oil sector.

Baghdad  - Turkish President Abdullah Gul, in the first visit by a Turkish head of state to Iraq in 33 years, on Monday urged the Iraqi government to do more to uproot Kurdish separatists hiding in the mountains along Iraq's border with Turkey.

In a joint news conference in Baghdad on Monday, Gul and Iraqi Prime Minister Jalal Talabani, himself an ethnic Kurd, promised to present a common regional front in putting an end to cross-border attacks from militants from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) based in northern Iraq.