Iraq’s President Says Deal With Insurgents Is Possible

Iraq’s president says he and American officials have met with leaders of seven of the country’s armed insurgent groups and believe they can be persuaded to end their rebellion, according to a summary of remarks released Sunday by his office.

President Jalal Talabani told a gathering of Iraqi and Arab intellectuals during a Kurdish cultural festival Saturday that he thought some of the Sunni Muslim Arab insurgents waging a bloody guerrilla war against U.S.-led forces and the Iraqi government could be persuaded to swap violence for a role in the political process.

“I think that it is possible to reach agreements with seven armed organizations which have visited me,” Talabani said, according to a transcript of his remarks.

He did not identify the groups or say when the meetings took place, but he did say that American political officials had been involved.

Bush administration officials have previously acknowledged holding indirect meetings with some of the Iraqi Sunni groups fighting the U.S. occupation.

Talabani, a former Kurdish guerrilla warrior who for years battled former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, did not suggest that a deal would end the violence plaguing Iraq.

But many here believe the first step toward reducing the carnage is to isolate such foreign Islamic radicals as Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian who refers to himself as the “emir” of Al Qaeda in Iraq, from nationalist Iraqi Sunnis using violence to win back power in a nation where the Shiite Muslim majority is now the dominant political force.

“The Zarqawis have declared a genocidal war against the Iraqi people,” Talabani said.

“But there are groups other than the [predominately Sunni Hussein loyalists] and the Zarqawis who have joined the armed action on the basis of ousting the occupier, and those are the ones we are seeking to conduct dialogue with and to bring them into the political process.”

But suggestions that Talabani was poised to strike a deal with insurgent groups were challenged by Ibrahim Shammari, spokesman for the Islamic Army in Iraq, who denied that his militant group had met Talabani or U.S. officials.

“Our strategic choice is to resist the occupation by armed force,” Shammari told Al Jazeera television, according to the Qatar-based news channel’s website. “We neither met the Americans, nor the U.S. ambassador, nor with the government because it is an illegal government with no credibility.”

U.S. and Iraqi officials have struggled to draw the country’s disparate religious and ethnic groups into a national unity government. But Iraq’s new leaders have yet to agree on a power-sharing arrangement that would divide key ministries -- including defense, domestic security, oil and foreign affairs -- among competing blocs.

Negotiations continued Sunday, but no deal was expected for at least a few days. Iraqi lawmakers said they would convene parliament Wednesday, if only to demonstrate to a weary and frazzled country that they were capable of action.

“The Iraqi people are wondering why parliament is not holding any sessions despite the many issues to be discussed,” said Abbas Bayati, a prominent lawmaker in the ruling Shiite alliance. “The parliament will convene to discuss many hot issues facing society. It is not justified for the parliament to wait for the government to be formed.”

Continued violence underscored the urgency of establishing a functioning government. On Sunday, a bomb exploded on a minibus in Baghdad, injuring six people, and an official of the Ministry of Commerce was shot to death as he drove through a neighborhood in the capital.

Three Western contractors were killed when their convoy was attacked on a highway south of Baghdad.

Clashes between U.S. forces and gunmen in Ramadi, about 60 miles west of the capital, left at least two civilian bystanders dead, a hospital official said.

Meanwhile, an armed incursion across the border by Iranian forces in northern Iraq underscored the dangers that a chaotic Iraq posed to the region. The Iranians fired more than 180 artillery shells and pursued Kurdish rebels across the mountainous border, Iraq’s Ministry of Defense said Sunday.

No clear casualty figures were available, but Kurdish officials said they had reports that eight fighters belonging to Kurdish groups battling Turkey and Iran were killed. The battle is one of a number of cross-border raids into Iraq’s heavily Kurdish northern provinces by Iranian and Turkish troops in recent weeks. Tensions have risen in both countries over Kurdish demands for more autonomy.

A similar incursion across the border 10 days ago drew a rebuke from Baghdad, where there are suspicions about any Iranian meddling in Iraqi affairs.

*

Times special correspondents in Baghdad, Irbil and Ramadi contributed to this report.