|
Rice urges Iraqis to bridge differences
(AP)
Updated: 2005-11-11 15:56
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a personal appeal Friday for
Iraqis to bridge sectarian differences, venturing to a majority Sunni Arab
region of the country to ask for cooperation in the coming election.
"I want to talk about the importance of reaching across sectarian lines,"
Rice said on her unannounced visit to this northern Iraqi city, which is about
60 percent Sunni Arab.
Rice made the comments to reporters traveling with her to the region. The
secretary arrived at a military airport and rode by helicopter to U.S. base,
flying over sheep grazing next to the roofless shells of bombed-out buildings
and houses.
Rice's trip, her second to Iraq as secretary of state, comes five weeks
before elections for a permanent Iraqi government. Like initial elections last
January and a constitution-writing exercise this summer, the new round of voting
is a marker of Iraq's political development. The Bush administration also hopes
it is a step closer to the day when U.S. forces can leave the country.
While in Iraq, Rice was meeting with the provisional governor, Duraid
Kashmoula, a Sunni, whose cousin and predecessor was killed by insurgents last
year.
She was also helping launch an experiment in the fight to clear insurgents
from Iraqi cities and keep them at bay. She was reviewing three combined
civilian-military units known as provisional reconstruction teams, which are
rapid response units meant to move into violent areas once insurgents are gone
and quickly establish order.
Units in Mosul, Hillah and Kirkuk are the first of 16 planned. Each may
eventually have 60 to 100 people from various parts of the U.S. government.
Sunnis, stripped of their former political primacy under Saddam Hussein,
first boycotted U.S.-backed efforts to establish a new representative government
in Iraq, and then last month voted in large numbers against a national
constitution many saw as sealing their fate as disempowered minority. The
constitution passed, and Rice framed the voting as a success because Sunnis
turned out at all.
In the province of Nineveh, which includes Mosul, the vote was 55 percent
against the referendum and 45 percent for it.
Political progress has been offset in Mosul and elsewhere by pernicious
violence, including the deaths last month in Mosul of four U.S. Embassy
employees killed by a roadside bomb.
Rice arrived in Iraq the day after a suicide bomber killed 35 people at a
Baghdad restaurant favored by police, and a car bomb killed seven at an Iraqi
army recruiting center to the north. More than 30 people were wounded in the
attacks.
Elsewhere, Iraqi troops along the Iranian border found 27 decomposing bodies,
unidentified victims of the grisly violence plaguing the country.
Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed in an Internet posting that it staged the attack on
the restaurant in retaliation for U.S. and Iraqi operations near the Syrian
border. Earlier, it claimed responsibility for Wednesday night's deadly hotel
bombings in neighboring Jordan, linking those blasts to the conflict in Iraq.
|
