BAGHDAD, 22 April 2007 — Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki will begin a regional tour today to drum up support for next month’s international conference in Egypt aimed at quelling the raging bloodshed in Iraq. His tour comes to the backdrop of a warning by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Iraqi leaders that they need to work faster to reconcile their rival factions as American support cannot be taken for granted for ever.
Eight people were yesterday killed in Iraq, including a town mayor and four members of a Kurdish Shiite family from the northern oil hub of Kirkuk. Gunmen killed the family, beheading their eight-year-old girl, police Capt. Mohammed Ibrahim said, suggesting a sectarian motive.
Mahdi Abdul Husain, the mayor of Musayyib, a town south of Baghdad, was killed in a roadside bomb along with his bodyguard, said police Lt. Hathim Al-Hadiri.
Maliki will leave for Cairo today and is expected to travel on to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other regional states for preparatory talks ahead of the May 3-4 meeting, Iraqi officials told AFP. The ministerial meeting, a follow-up to an ambassadors’ conference last month in Baghdad, will be attended by Iraq’s neighbors and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Japan, Canada and Germany.
“Egypt will be his first stopover where he will hold talks with President Hosni Mubarak, before moving to Kuwait and other countries in the region,” an official at Maliki’s office said on condition of anonymity. In Cairo, the state news agency MENA added that Maliki would also meet with his Egyptian counterpart, Ahmed Nazif.
Neither official could say whether Maliki will visit Iran, which has still not confirmed its attendance at the Egypt meeting amid a dispute over five Iranian officials held prisoner by US forces in Iraq. If Iran were to attend the high-profile gathering at the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, its officials would sit at the same table as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who has already confirmed she will be there.
