BAGHDAD, 27 June 2005 — US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld yesterday confirmed that US officials had made contacts with an insurgent group. Meanwhile dozens of people were killed in a series of suicide attacks in northern Iraq.

In answer to a question on the Fox News Sunday television program about a British Sunday Times report that US officials contacted insurgents in a bid to split off homegrown Iraqi insurgents from foreign fighters, Rumsfeld said:

“Sure, my goodness, yeah. The first thing you want to do is split people off and get some people to be supportive. The same thing’s going on in Afghanistan,” he said.

Rumsfeld added that such “meetings... go on all the time,” and said “I think the attention to this is overblown.”

“I would not make a big deal out of it,” he said.

According to the report in the Sunday Times, US officials have held talks on two separate occasions in early June with Iraqi insurgents in the hope of negotiating an eventual breakthrough that might stem the violence in the country.

The meetings reportedly took place at a villa near Balad in the hills 65 km north of Baghdad the paper said, citing an Iraqi source said to have attended both events.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Rumsfeld was asked about the two reported meetings.

Government officials “are reaching out” to those that do not support them. “They’re not going to try to bring in the people with blood on their hands, for sure, but they’re certainly reaching out continuously, and we help to facilitate those from time to time,” Rumsfeld said. He vehemently denied that the talks amounted to negotiating with terrorists. “There’s no one negotiating with Zarqawi or the people that are out chopping peoples’ heads off,” he said.

Four US officials — reportedly including senior military and intelligence officers, a civilian staffer from Congress and a representative of the US Embassy in Baghdad — met at the villa with a former Iraqi minister, senior tribal leaders and a small group of insurgent commanders. Further talks were apparently planned, the report added.

A US official in Baghdad said contacts had been made with people close to Iraqi insurgents, but stressed that the talks were not actual negotiations.

“For some time now we’ve been talking to all sorts of Iraqis, some of whom are kind of dubious,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

The source added: “It’s hard to gauge how much influence anyone has with insurgents, or to determine which insurgent group they’re associated with for that matter.”

The official made one thing clear: “There has been no change in US policy. We are not negotiating with insurgents.”

In his “Fox News Sunday” interview, Rumsfeld said it may take as long as 12 years to defeat Iraqi insurgents and that Iraqi security forces will finish the job because US and foreign troops will have left the country.

To a question about whether US troop levels are adequate to vanquish the increasingly violent insurgency, Rumsfeld said: “We’re not going to win against the insurgency. The Iraqi people are going to win against the insurgency. That insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years. Coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency.”

At least 34 people were killed in a string of suicide attacks aimed at Iraqi security forces in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul yesterday.

The first attack happened at a police headquarters in Mosul at 6.15 a.m., killing 13 policemen and two civilians and wounding six more, said US Army Capt. Mark Walter, a spokesman in Mosul.

A suicide bomber who hid explosives beneath watermelons in a pickup truck slammed into the headquarters. The explosion partially destroyed Bab Al-Toob police station in a busy downtown section.

Less than two hours later, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a parking lot outside an Iraqi Army base on the outskirts of Mosul, killing 16 and wounding seven, Walter said. Almost all of the victims were civilian employees arriving at the site for work, he said.

A third attacker strapped with a belt of explosives walked into Mosul Jumhouri Teaching Hospital at 2.15 p.m. and blew himself up in a room for police officers guarding the facility, killing five policemen and wounding six.