August 20, 2007	Monday	Sha’aban 6, 1428

BAGHDAD, Aug 19: Iraq’s fractious leaders on Sunday agreed on the agenda for a political summit called by embattled Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in a bid to salvage his crumbling unity government.

The breakthrough came on the second day of preparatory talks involving the country’s most senior political leaders, Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi said in a statement.

“We reached agreement on a number of issues,” the statement said. “The most important is the agenda for the summit and who will attend the meeting.” Talks involving Maliki, Kurdish President Jalal Talabani, Hashemi, who is a Sunni, Shia Vice-President Adel Abdel Mahdi, and Masud Barzani, president of the northern Kurdish region, began on Saturday and continued into Sunday, an official from Talabani’s office said.

No date has yet been set for the summit but the official said it would probably take place “in a couple of days”. He described the weekend talks as “preparatory” for the summit of political leaders across the spectrum, which was called by Maliki on Aug 12 after a number of political blocs, including the main Sunni grouping, the National Concord Front, walked out of his unity cabinet.

The boycotts have left Maliki, a Shia, with just 23 ministers in his 40-member cabinet, leading to delays in the passage of crucial laws aimed at rebuilding the country.

In a bid to shore up his government, Maliki on Thursday announced the formation of an alliance grouping his Shia Dawa party and Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council and the Kurdish factions of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Kurdish Democratic Party (PDK).

But the National Concord Front slammed the new tie-up as a “futile” exercise.

Maliki is under growing pressure from Washington to end the infighting, concerned that it could torpedo efforts to reconcile the warring factions and undermine the work of 155,000 American troops trying to end the conflict.—AFP