BAGHDAD, 1 May 2006 — President Jalal Talabani met recently with representatives of seven armed groups and is optimistic they may agree to lay down their arms, his office said yesterday.
“I think we may reach an agreement with seven armed groups that visited me and I met with them,” his office said in a statement without indicating when the meeting took place.
Talabani’s spokesman Kamran Qaradaghi refused to identify the seven groups, although they were presumed to be Sunni Arab insurgents.
It was the first time a senior Iraqi official has acknowledged meeting with figures from the insurgency, although US officials have said privately they have conferred directly with Iraqis who claimed to have contacts with insurgents.
Last year, Talabani offered to meet with representatives of insurgent groups except Al-Qaeda in Iraq or Saddam Hussein loyalists.
Meanwhile, bombs and drive-by shootings killed 10 people yesterday, and the bodies of seven Iraqi men who apparently had been kidnapped and tortured in captivity were found in three different areas of Baghdad, police said.
The deadliest attack yesterday involved a roadside bomb that exploded on a highway south of the capital, killing three security contractors and wounding two. Police said the casualties were all British, but Britain’s Foreign Office said the dead were not British and that it could only confirm that one of the two wounded was.
Despite the violence, Iraqi Prime Minister-designate Nuri Al-Maliki continued to meet with politicians to choose his Cabinet for Iraq’s new national unity government — one aimed at calming sectarian tensions and luring disaffected Sunni Arabs away from the insurgency.
Al-Maliki has promised to finish the job in the next two weeks, but it could be difficult for him to fill top Cabinet posts with politicians who are not affiliated with parties that have maintained armed militias being blamed for sectarian violence.
