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BAGHDAD, June 28: Iraqi President Jalal Talabani distanced his government on Tuesday from US talks with guerilla leaders, insisting they were strictly a US affair despite protestations from Washington that it was acting only as a facilitator.
“The Iraqi government has nothing to do with the negotiations with insurgents,” Mr Talabani told a press conference marking the first anniversary of Iraq’s recovery of its sovereignty from the US-led occupation authority.
“If the Americans are negotiating with them, it’s up to them.”
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had confirmed on Sunday that US officials had held talks with guerilla groups, but he insisted Washington’s role was limited to that of broker for the Iraqi government.
“The Iraqis have a sovereign government,” Mr Rumsfeld told Fox News. “They will decide what their relationships with various elements of insurgents will be. We facilitate those from time to time.”
OLDEST MP KILLED: Iraq’s oldest member of parliament, Dhari al Fayadh, died on Tuesday with his son and three bodyguards in a suicide bombing north of Baghdad, while nine people were killed and almost 30 wounded elsewhere.
In Washington, US President George Bush prepared to present increasingly skeptical Americans with reasons why up to 135,000 troops should stay in Iraq, as another US death pushed the toll to 1,730 since March 2003.
More than half of Americans now believe Bush’s administration “intentionally misled” the public in going to war in Iraq, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Monday.
Iraqis were marking the first anniversary of their recovered sovereignty, though few could point to major material improvements in that time.
Mr Fayadh, 87, and his son were killed when “a vehicle packed with explosives and driven by a suicide bomber was detonated alongside his two-car convoy in Al-Rashidyah,” an interior ministry source said.
Chief of the Albuamer, a powerful and predominantly Shiite tribe, Fayadh had presided over the first sessions of Iraq’s new parliament before a speaker was elected.
Sheikh Humam Hamudi, head of the parliamentary committee currently drafting a new constitution, said: “Those who killed Sheikh al-Fayadh are criminals trying to destroy the country, and those trying to negotiate with these criminals do so with the enemies of Iraq.”
He was referring to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has acknowledged contacts with some insurgent leaders.
“Sheikh Fayadh was a patriot, all know how loyal he was to his country. He loved Iraq,” Hamudi said.
Mr Fayadh was lord of the mud huts around his gated villa complex in the orange and palm groves of his rural fiefdom in Diyala province just north of the capital.
He won election to the 275-member national assembly in landmark January polls after running as an independent in the victorious Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance.
The octogenarian was enjoying a political comeback after losing his parliamentary seat in 1958 when Iraqi army officers overthrew the British-backed monarchy.
In other Iraqi violence Tuesday:
- Three police commandos were killed and five wounded in Samarra, north of Baghdad, when a homemade bomb blast slammed into their patrol, according to army Captain Hassan al Juburi.
- Two soldiers died and one was wounded when attackers fired rocket propelled grenades at them south of Samarra, Major Jumah Mohammed said.
- Two policemen were killed and two wounded in an attack by around 70 gunmen on the headquarters of security forces on the outskirts of Samarra, Major Latif Shaab said. Three police cars were destroyed.
- A policeman died and 17 people were wounded when a suicide bomber walked into a hospital in Musayyib.—AFP
