Bahrain's envoy in Iraq has been shot and slightly wounded by armed men in Baghdad.

Four armed men opened fire on the envoy's car in the capital's upscale Mansour neighbourhood as he was being driven to work on Tuesday, a police source said. The driver was unharmed.

A hospital source said the envoy, Hassan Malalla al-Ansari, was wounded in the right hand by a single bullet. The motive for the attack was unclear.

The attack was the second on a senior Arab diplomat in the city in three days. Egypt's top envoy to Iraq, Ihab al-Sherif, was captured late on Saturday.

Sunni Arab cleric Harith al-Dhari condemned all kidnappings, calling them "a bad phenomenon that emerged after the occupation of Iraq by America and its allies".

Meanwhile, new Sunni delegates are expected to meet for the first time later on Tuesday with the parliamentary committee that is drafting a new constitution.

Washington and Baghdad are trying to use diplomacy and politics to defuse an uprising that has grown much more violent since the government took power in April after a January election in which few Sunnis took part.

Iraq's parliament formally welcomed on Tuesday 15 new Sunni Arab members to the committee tasked with writing a constitution, making it the first national political body to include significant representation from Saddam Hussein's formerly dominant minority since the election.

The committee was expanded to 71 members to include more Sunni Arabs. Previously there were just two.

Also on Tuesday, four female employees at Baghdad airport were killed and three others wounded after armed men attacked the minibus taking them to work, said an Interior Ministry source.

The attack happened at about 8am (0400 GMT) in Ameriyah, a tense area in western Baghdad and was followed by clashes between armed men and Iraqi security forces, the source said, adding it was unclear yet if there were any casualties from the fighting.

There have been several deadly incidents in the past involving Iraqis working at the airport.

Iran embassy blast

Also in the capital, a convoy of western security guards was hit by a roadside bomb on Tuesday outside the Iranian embassy, wounding an Iraqi civilian and damaging a vehicle, the US military and security sources said.

The attack targeted a "personnel security detachment", said a US military spokesman, using the customary term for private security guards, without elaborating.

In a separate incident, the US military said one of its patrols was hit with a roadside bomb in southeastern Baghdad and that "there were several casualties transported to hospital".

Elsewhere, armed men seized eight Iraqis as they drove to work at a US base in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, said police Colonel Modhafar al-Majmaie. A car bomb killed two civilians in western Baghdad, police said.

In separate incidents in Mosul, armed men killed a senior member of the Kurdish Democratic Party's (KDP) Mosul branch and a bodyguard of the provincial Nineveh governor, officials said.

Iraqi soldiers were also killed and others injured in a car bomb explosion targeting their patrol in al-Shuhada neighbourhood south of Falluja, medical sources told Aljazeera.

In Tal Afar, about 50km west of Mosul, armed men assassinated a council member, Abdul Kareem Suleiman, officials said.

PHOTO CAPTION

Bahrain's top envoy in Iraq, Hassan Malallah al-Ansari, lies wounded in a Baghdad hospital Tuesday, July 5, 2005. (AP)