President Bashar Assad too held talks with Allawi, who has been embroiled in months of haggling over the formation of a new Iraqi government, two days after the Syrian leader met separately with Sadr.

Assad reiterated “Syria’s support for any inter-Iraqi accord (on a government) which conserves the unity of Iraq, its Arab identity and its sovereignty,” Syria’s official news agency SANA reported.

Allawi, who is vying for the post of prime minister with the incumbent, Nuri Al-Maliki, in turn thanked Syria for playing host to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees and its support for efforts to restore stability in Iraq. Efforts to form a new government, more than four months after a March 7 election in Iraq, also figured in the talks in Damascus last Saturday between Assad and Sadr.

The bloc of anti-US cleric Al-Sadr, who lives in exile in Iran, gained 39 seats in Iraq’s new 325-strong Parliament, against 91 for Allawi and 89 for Al-Maliki — both also Shiites.

On Monday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was also headed for Damascus to meet Assad for talks covering Iraq, their common neighbor.

Meanwhile, a suicide car bomber rammed into a convoy carrying employees of a British company in northern Iraq on Monday, killing four of them and wounding five Iraqi civilians, Iraqi security officials said.

The suicide bomber targeted the last vehicle of the convoy in Mosul, a dangerous city where Al-Qaeda remains active, and the force of the blast threw the armored vehicle 40 meters into a ravine, killing everyone inside, police said.

“I saw the other members of the convoy bring out four dead foreign civilians from the smashed car. One of them was beheaded,” an Iraqi military officer said.

In another development, the chief judge of a court where Tareq Aziz is being tried says the defense lawyer of the former Saddam Hussein-era foreign minister is free to come to the country and represent his client.

Mahmoud Al-Hassan also said on Monday that the court would “welcome” a request by Aziz, if one is submitted, to delay his trial pending the arrival of his attorney, Izzat Aref. Aziz and 20 other former regime members were in court Monday facing charges linked to a campaign of killings, displacement and torture under Saddam targeting members of Dawa, the party to which Al-Maliki belongs.

Aref claims the Justice Ministry has, without any legal basis, revoked his permission to pay prison visits to Aziz and other former Saddam officials he represents.