Five other people were killed in incidents in northern Iraq's main city of Mosul and the former rebel bastion of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, security officials added.

"Two Ugandans and one Peruvian were killed and 15 people injured" by "a rocket fired into the International Zone," the embassy said, using another name for the Green Zone in central Baghdad.

"Two of the injured were American citizens," it said in a statement. "All the dead and injured worked for a US government security contractor which protects US government facilities in Iraq."

The Green Zone, which houses the US and several other major embassies as well as Iraqi government buildings, is still the target of frequent rocket and mortar attacks.

US forces handed full responsibility for the "entry control points" that regulate movement into and out of the area over to Iraqi authorities on June 1, 2010.

The transfer was part of an American military drawdown in Iraq that will see all but 50,000 US soldiers leave the country by the end of August.

In the restive city of Mosul on Thursday, insurgents killed four people and wounded nine others in separate attacks.

Among the dead were Sheikh Abd Fathi al-Naimi, the Sunni prayer leader of Al-Areej mosque, and two policemen.

Mosul has remained a hotbed of insurgent activity even as levels of violence have fallen off in much of the rest of the country.

And in Fallujah, a policeman was killed and a civilian wounded when a magnetic "sticky bomb" affixed to the policeman's car detonated, a police official said.

Three Iraqi soldiers were wounded by a roadside bomb that targeted a four-vehicle patrol in Garma, east of Fallujah, said provincial security official Major Yassin Mohammed.

earlier related report
Billions needed to rebuild Iraqi industry: minister
Baghdad (AFP) July 22, 2010 - Improved security is allowing Iraq to rebuild its shattered industry but up to seven billion dollars is needed to help the sector recover from years of war and sanctions, the industry minister told AFP.

"At the present estimate, I would think it will require between five and seven billion dollars (3.9 to 5.5 billion euros) of investment" to "re-invent the industrial sector in Iraq in a modern way," Fawzi Hariri said in an interview.

"What has been spent to date has been less than one billion dollars," said Hariri, a 52-year-old Christian member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party who has held the post since 2006.

Iraq's industrial sector, which was once among the region's most advanced, has been decimated by 30 years of destructive wars and sanctions.

"Probably 97 percent" of government revenue over the past several years has come from oil," Hariri said.

Iraq fought Iran from 1980-88, invaded Kuwait in 1990 and was expelled in 1991. It was then targeted by crippling UN sanctions until the 2003 US-led invasion, which unleashed a wave of internecine violence that persists to this day.

By "2003, almost 99 percent of Iraq's industry was at a standstill," Hariri said. "It was either destroyed ... looted or was shut down."

Since then, some progress has been made.

"Today, over 70 percent of the factories are actually working and producing," although "they are not working to the right capacity."

Hariri's ministry controls 70 companies in six sectors: construction, chemicals and petrochemicals, engineering, food, pharmaceuticals and textiles. Various other ministries own another 122 companies.

But while many companies are state owned and could theoretically be well-funded, Iraq's myriad needs have drained the country's coffers and created intense competition among government enterprises for scarce cash.

Security, health, education, oil and other needs "took a priority on the government budget in comparison to the needs of industry," Hariri said.

"Therefore, we were working with very limited resources."

Since government funding has been lacking, private-sector investment has taken on crucial importance in rehabilitating the sector.

"Due to our need (for) more funding to come in for rehabilitation and due to the lack of funding from the government ... we had to go for private sector" investment, said Hariri.

There are currently at least 10 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in joint ventures with private firms, he said.

"These are joint venture agreements based on production sharing, which means that the investor will come to take charge of the whole facility, manage it, invest in it, develop it, and we will share the end product for a period of time," he said.

"I wanted to have 50" joint ventures, but "security and instability ... have actually prevented many people from coming forward."

Security concerns were "a major, major, block, but it's getting a lot better," he said.

Iraq will eventually "happily privatise" between 90 and 95 percent of its SOEs, Hariri said. As of now, however, those companies cannot legally be sold off, and the minister hopes a law allowing for such sales will be in place by the end of next year.

But he noted that when Paul Bremer, who headed the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority, ordered the sale of SOEs soon after the 2003 invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein, "it was like having a broken-down vehicle ... and you put a 'for sale' sign -- nobody would buy it."

Developing government-owned companies, including via joint ventures, will make them more valuable in an eventual sale, Hariri hopes.

Various new laws have been passed but not yet implemented. These include legislation to prevent the "dumping" of goods in the Iraqi market and to impose tariffs on some imports and will also aid industrial development, he said.

Asked if some sectors have priority for development, Hariri said "we need to get them (all) moving and working to make sure they are not a burden on the budget."

"At the moment, we are looking at somewhere in the region of 25-plus percent of our budget that goes on salaries and pay" for the ministry's roughly 200,000 employees.

"We need to cut that drastically, to something around 10 percent," he said, and "to do that, we need to encourage private sector development."

"We have three plan periods" for certain goals to be accomplished, Hariri said.

In the period ending this year, the aim "is stabilising the facilities and getting them started."

The goal for the second period, from 2011 to 2015, is to "develop further partnership and investment and possibly privatisation."

And from 2015 to 2020, the goal is "supporting the development of the private sector" so that industry eventually accounts for five to 10 percent of Iraq's currently oil-dominated economy.

But that all "depends on the capacity of us being able to attract (foreign direct investment), and our capacity also to attract more money from the existing budget."

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