  |
|
Iraq, US leaders rush to save foundering nationAP Photo/Sabah Arar, Pool
Coalition spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell speaks during a press conference in Baghdad, Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006. US and Iraqi forces have killed or captured at least 7,000 al-Qaida fighters in the last two years and 30 senior leaders were taken out of action since July, said the US military spokesman.
By Paul Schemm
AFP
BAGHDAD
Petroleumworld.com 11 29 06Rival visions of how to save Iraq were on display on Tuesday as US and regional leaders engaged in a flurry of diplomatic meetings designed to find ways to halt an inexorable spiral towards civil war.
Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei told Iraqi President Jalal Talabani that Iraq's American "occupiers" should leave as a first step towards restoring peace, an idea unlikely to find favour in Baghdad and ruled out for the immediate by Washington.
Talabani's three-day visit to Tehran coincided with preparations for Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to meet US President George W. Bush in Amman to seek new ideas to halt a destabilising wave of sectarian bloodshed.
For his part Bush -- who has accused Iran of promoting violence in Iraq -- ruled out any hurried pull-out.
"One thing I won't do, I am not going to pull the troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete," he said in a speech in Riga, Latvia, ahead of a NATO summit.
Meanwhile, US troops were preoccupied with the hunt for a missing pilot whose F-16 fighter jet crashed northwest of Baghdad on Monday in an area where insurgent fighters were battling American ground forces.
A US military official told AFP that the airman was thought to have been killed in the crash and his body seized by insurgent fighters.
And, in the latest example of what the White House dubbed a "new phase" in the violence, at least two car bombs exploded outside Baghdad's Yarmuk hospital morgue, wounding several dozen people waiting to collect dead relatives.
Talabani was in Tehran to meet his Iranian counterpart to seek help in stemming a sectarian conflict that has claimed hundreds of lives just in the last few days and continues to rage out of control.
"We need Iran's comprehensive help to fight terrorism, restore security and stabilize Iraq," he admitted on a visit to Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"We will help our Iraqi brothers with all that we can to implement and reinforce security in Iraq," Ahmadinejad replied.
The United States and Britain have accused Tehran of fomenting violence within Iraq by arming and training Shiite militias hostile to the 150,000 strong US force protecting Maliki's beleaguered coalition government.But, amid signs that Washington is itself preparing for a shift in strategy, Bush said Baghdad should pursue its own diplomatic agenda, if this meant talking to US foes such as Iran and Syria.
"Iraq is a sovereign nation which is conducting its own foreign policy," Bush said in Estonia, shortly before heading to neighbouring Latvia.
A series of car bombs in Baghdad's Shiite neighbourhood of Sadr City last Thursday killed over 200 people, the single deadliest bombing in the country since the 2003 invasion, prompting revenge attacks by Shiite militias.
The ensuing sectarian clashes, which took place mainly in Baghdad, its surroundings and Diyala province to the east, have increased concerns that the future of the country will inevitably be one of savage internecine conflict.
Nightly, the capital, which houses a quarter of the country's population, resounds with the blast of mortar shells and the thump of heavy machine guns as rival neighbourhoods launch raids and artillery salvos against each other.
For Iraqis the semantic question over whether the fighting meets the criteria of full scale warfare -- a dispute revived this week by the decision of some US media outlets to adopt the phrase -- misses the point.
"If we wake up every morning to hear that 40 to 60 bodies have turned up here and there in Baghdad, civil war cannot be any different," said Damis Abdullah, a Sunni Arab woman working in the culture ministry.Many Iraqis focus their ire on the country's political leadership for pushing a sectarian agenda that is only leading to more intense conflict between the armed factions.
"The Sunni and Shiite politicians are trying to drag the country into a civil war using the militias and gunmen who are spreading here and there," said Kadhim Saleh, a Shiite writer living in Baghdad.
Such an analysis has become quite common in the battered capital and even Maliki himself lambasted the nation's politicians on Sunday for not doing enough to halt the slide into chaos.
In the western province of Al-Anbar, however, it is not civil war that is causing the crisis, but an Al-Qaeda-led insurgency which now controls the desert region, according to a US military report leaked to the Washington Post.
According to the report "the social and political situation has deteriorated to a point" that US and Iraqi troops "are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in Al-Anbar," the Post reported.
The US military said that a marine had been killed in fighting in Anbar on Monday, bringing the military's losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 2,877, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
In the northern oil city Kirkuk, a suicide bomber rushed the convoy of provincial governor Mustafa Abdel Rahman, killing one person and wounding 18 people just outside the municipal hospital. The governor escaped unscathed.
AFP 28 1612 GMT 11 06
Copyright© 2006 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
Your
feedback is important to us!
We invite all our readers to share with us
their views and comments about this article.
Write to editor@petroleumworld.com
Any
question or suggestions, please write to:
editor@petroleumworld.com
Best
Viewed with IE
5.01+
Windows
NT 4.0, '95, '98 and ME +/ 800x600 pixels