Positive development
In a positive development, a senior government official said a representative of an unidentified insurgent group responded to an offer by President Jalal Talabani to talk with those willing to lay down their arms.
Presidential adviser Lieutenant General Wafiq al-Samaraei told Qatar's Al-Jazeera television that he had received a call from someone "who claimed to be a senior official of the resistance."
"I informed him that I would welcome him in a meeting to hear from him, but this doesn't indicate our acceptance of their demands," he said.
Al-Samaraei, a former head of military intelligence under Saddam, did not identify the caller, and it was unclear whether the overture represented a breakthrough.
On Tuesday, a suicide bomber struck a busy commercial street in Kirkuk, leaving 22 dead, another 23 people were wounded, after insurgents lured police to the scene by shooting an officer, officials said.
Half the dead were police who rushed to the scene after gunmen killed a fellow officer, according to police Brigadier General Sarhad Qader. The blast was just the latest of many in Kirkuk, a mixed Arab, Kurdish and Turkoman city in an oil-producing region 290km north of Baghdad.
More than 160 Iraqis, most of them Shiites, have died in a wave of suicide operations across Iraq.
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