Iraq’s prime minister headed north on Sunday to the self-ruled Kurdish region to defuse rising tensions and address a range of disputes that have poisoned relations and threatened to become a new source of conflict for the battered country as US forces increasingly disengage.
The meeting came as six died in bombings in Baghdad and western Iraq.
US officials have warned Arab-Kurdish tensions could jeopardize security gains and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates offered US help to mediate during his visit to Iraq last month in which he traveled to Baghdad and the Kurdish city of Irbil.
Shiite lawmaker Ali al-Adeeb insisted there was no US pressure to hold the meeting but said: “There is a will and a wish to solve all the problems between the region and the central government before the US withdrawal from Iraq.”
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met recently re-elected Kurdistan regional President Massoud Barzani, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and other Kurdish officials on Sunday at the resort town of Dokan. The leaders agreed to establish a committee to solve the outstanding issues.
“The challenges that face the political process require more meetings and cooperation between all Iraqi people,” al-Maliki said on Sunday at a press conference with Barzani and Talabani. “I am very optimistic after this meeting.”
The prime minister, who faces national parliamentary elections on Jan. 16, said last month in Washington that differences between the Kurds and the rest of Iraq were among the most dangerous problems facing his country and that they must be resolved by constitutional means, not by force.
“We discussed the stalled issues and a delegation from the Kurdistan region will visit Baghdad to solve the problems,” Barzani said.
Officials said the meeting was an important goodwill gesture between the two sides, which have been at loggerheads for month.
“It is very important to clear the air and to instill confidence about the situation between Baghdad and the region,” Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh, a Kurd, said on the sidelines. “Both sides reaffirmed their commitment within the constitution to solve all the problems.”
The northern, self-ruled Kurdish region has enjoyed relative calm since the 2003 US invasion that ousted former president Saddam Hussein, but rivalries between Kurds and Arabs have fueled attacks in nearby areas.
Meanwhile, in western Iraq, a bomb ripped through an area packed with sidewalk vendors at an outdoor market, killing at least five people and wounding more than 30 in Haditha, said a police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Haditha, a city on the Euphrates 220km northwest of Baghdad, is in Anbar Province, which has seen a series of bombings recently after a period of relative calm.
In Baghdad itself, a bomb hidden in a plastic bag exploded near a local official’s office, killing one civilian and wounding three other people in the mainly Sunni district of Azamiyah, police said.
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
DIVERSIFY: While Japan already has plentiful access to LNG, a pipeline from Alaska would help it move away from riskier sources such as Russia and the Middle East Japan is considering offering support for a US$44 billion gas pipeline in Alaska as it seeks to court US President Donald Trump and forestall potential trade friction, three officials familiar with the matter said. Officials in Tokyo said Trump might raise the project, which he has said is key for US prosperity and security, when he meets Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba for the first time in Washington as soon as next week, the sources said. Japan has doubts about the viability of the proposed 1,287km pipeline — intended to link fields in Alaska’s north to a port in the south, where
RSS