Arab League chief Amr Mussa made two landmark visits in Iraq on Saturday to raise support for a proposed national reconciliation conference, while the toll of US deaths grew to nearly 2,000.
Mussa, on his first trip to Iraq since the fall of former president Saddam Hussein in 2003, said he won crucial backing from Shiite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani for a planned attempt to reconcile Iraq's divided communities. The head of the 22-member Arab League then flew to the Kurdish city of Arbil in northern Iraq for an historic visit with regional president Massoud Barzani that marked Arab League recognition of the Kurdish autonomous region.
"We have always understood the Kurdish people's ambitions," Mussa told a press conference in Arbil.
He planned to spend Saturday night among the Kurds and attend a session of their regional parliament yesterday.
Mussa had previously met with the preeminent Sunni religious body, the Committee of Muslim Scholars, and several members of the government in Baghdad.
Shiite radical leader Moqtada al-Sadr rejected Mussa's overtures, however, continuing to insist the League clearly condemn insurgent attacks before he would talk with the pan-Arab body, which wants to hold a preparatory conference in Cairo on Nov. 15 ahead of full talks in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the US military announced that four soldiers had died on Friday in various attacks, bringing the overall toll since the US-led invasion of March 2003 to 1,991 according to an AFP tally based on Pentagon figures.
Coalition forces killed 20 people suspected of links to Iraq's most wanted man, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and his al-Qaeda movement during raids on suspected safe houses near the Syrian border, the US military said.
contractors killed
The US military also yesterday confirmed that four US contractors were killed and two wounded in Iraq last month when their convoy got lost and was attacked by an angry mob of insurgents in a town north of Baghdad.
The attack occurred on Sept. 20 when the convoy, which included US military guards riding in Humvees, made a wrong turn into the mostly Sunni Arab town of Duluiyah and insurgents opened fire with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, Major Richard Goldenberg said.
The Sept. 20 Duluiyah attack, which occurred about 75km north of Baghdad, was first reported on Saturday by the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph.
The Telegraph reported that two of the contractors who had not been killed in the initial attack in Duluiyah were dragged alive from their vehicle, which had been badly shot up, and forced to kneel in the road before being killed.
The paper said, "Killing one of the men with a rifle round fired into the back of his head, they doused the other with petrol and set him alight."
"Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man's body to stoke the flames," it said. The crowd then "dragged their corpses through the street, chanting anti-US slogans."
Goldenberg said he could not confirm such details since his men were not at the scene of the attack.
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