Iraqis Clash in Cairo

On a day when Iraqi leaders gathered in Egypt for a summit on national reconciliation, the country’s unrelenting insurgency claimed the lives of 49 Iraqis and six U.S. soldiers Saturday, and factional bickering at the Cairo conference painted a bleak picture of a fundamentally divided society.

In the deadliest attack Saturday, a suicide bomber detonated his car among Shiite mourners at a funeral in a small town north of the capital. The bombing in Abu Saida, which killed 36 people, came hours after a car bomb killed 13 people in a market near Baghdad.

U.S. military officials announced that five soldiers from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division were killed, and five wounded, in two roadside bomb attacks on U.S. patrols near the northern oil-refining center of Baiji.

A sixth soldier died at a hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. He had been wounded when a driver deliberately rammed his vehicle near Baiji on Thursday, causing it to roll. Another soldier’s death in that attack had been announced earlier.

Baiji, about 30 miles north of Saddam Hussein’s hometown, Tikrit, has proved one of the most hostile parts of the country for U.S. forces.

At least 2,090 U.S. service personnel have died in the Iraq war, according to a list compiled by Associated Press.

The violence came as representatives of Iraq’s main religious, ethnic and sectarian groups met in Cairo for an Arab League-sponsored conference for national concord.

The country’s senior leadership, led by Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, addressed a diverse assembly representing Iraq’s political spectrum, including a smattering of former Baathists and some Sunni Arab clerics who claim to be attuned to the thinking of anti-government insurgents.

Many Iraqis followed the opening speeches on television, fascinated by the unusual range of political expression in a forum that would be almost impossible to re-create inside Iraq.

But there was also a high degree of skepticism, particularly among Shiite Muslims and some Kurds, who believe that Arab states are using the weekend conference to help their Sunni brethren regain the favored status they enjoyed under Hussein. Most of Iraq’s neighbors are dominated by Sunnis, who make up the majority of Muslims in the Arab world.

“I pray to God that this conference will put an end to hostilities, so that we Iraqis may live in harmony,” said Hussein Ali Abood, 25, a worker at a Baghdad men’s store.

Nonsense, said Mohammed Jasin Rubaiee, head of the municipal council in Baghdad’s Karada district: “With whom do we reconcile, with the terrorists, with the criminals? ... You cannot talk to people with blood on their hands.”

Meant to slow the bloodshed in Iraq, the conference turned bilious as the Iraqi delegates clashed over the insurgency, the constitution and the role of the United States in their country.

At one point, Iraqi Christian delegate Minas Ibrahim Yousifi accused the other delegates of being pawns of the United States, and dismissed Iraq’s new constitution as an American creation. Shiite and Kurdish representatives stormed from the hall in protest.

“They are insulting the Iraqi people, and they are insulting the constitution on which several million Iraqis have voted,” Jawad Maliki, the senior Iraqi Shiite legislator, told reporters outside. “They want the situation in Iraq to go back to the way it used to be so that the mass graves can return.”

At the coaxing of the Arab foreign ministers, the delegates soon calmed down and returned to the hall. Yousifi apologized, and the league agreed to delete his comments from the record.

Tensions were expected to last throughout the talks, which precede a larger national reconciliation conference to be held in Iraq early next year.

The divisions in Iraqi society were laid bare at the summit Saturday. Shiites and Kurds called for the condemnation of the insurgents; Sunnis responded by calling the violence “legitimate.” From the podium, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said there was no room for insurgents or die-hard Baathists in the emerging Iraqi government.

“We have drawn a red line,” said Talabani, decrying “the murderers and criminals among the followers of the old regime, who left us mass graves.” But Sunni leaders bridled at Talabani’s speech.

“It clearly contained a spirit of exclusion,” said Harith Dhari, the Sunni head of the Muslim Scholars Assn. The presence of foreign troops in Iraq is to blame for the insurgency, he argued.

“The root of the problem is the occupation. If it is not resolved, we will not come to a solution,” he said. “Armed resistance arose as a reaction to occupation. It is legitimate and is not an innovation.”

The talks opened with a speech by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who invoked Iraq’s role as a founding member of the Arab League and urged Iraqis to “guarantee the participation of all Iraqis in this process, without exception or marginalization.”

Delegates are expected to firm up plans and decide upon participants for next year’s conference. They are also holding meetings involving Iraqi factions that have been at odds.

Dhari met with Hadi Amery, the powerful head of the Badr Brigade, a Shiite militia, the Al Jazeera satellite television channel reported. Amery reportedly told the Sunni leader that his organization was ready to do whatever it took to achieve national reconciliation.

But the smooth words belied facts on the ground. Militiamen tied to Badr have been accused of holding and torturing Sunni prisoners in recent weeks, including at a prison discovered by U.S. and Iraqi troops.

At the same time, Kurdish and Shiite-based movements blame Sunni resistance groups for carrying out attacks such as the two suicide bombings Friday at mosques in northern Iraq that killed 80 people.

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Daniszewski reported from Baghdad and Stack from Cairo. Times researcher Jailan Zayan in Cairo and The Times’ Baghdad Bureau staff also contributed to this report.