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Anbar Province's Sunni leaders meet Iraqi prime minister

Sunni tribal leaders who have vowed to drive al-Qaeda out of Iraq's most restive province met the Shiite prime minister on Wednesday, marking what Washington hopes will be a breakthrough alliance against Islamist militants.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's meeting with sheikhs from Anbar Province -- heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency and the deadliest part of Iraq for US forces -- was one bit of reassuring news for the US and the Iraqi government.

Al-Qaeda followers have seized control of towns and villages along the length of the Euphrates valley from Falluja near Baghdad to the Syrian border, and Washington says its 30,000 troops in the province cannot beat them on their own.

But al-Qaeda's violent ways and severe interpretation of Sunni Islam have alienated traditional-minded Sunnis.

Sattar al-Buzayi, a Sunni sheikh from Anbar Province who has emerged in recent weeks as a leader of a tribal alliance against al-Qaeda, said he and about 15 other sheikhs had offered their cooperation to the Shiite prime minister.

Fellow tribal sheikh, Hameed Farhan, said most tribes supported the agreement. He called for tribesmen to join the army and police and said Maliki promised Iraqi troops for Anbar.

Maliki's office issued a statement praising the chiefs for their commitment to fighting the militants. It was the first time he had met them since they pledged to fight al-Qaeda in a gathering at Buzayi's Ramadi home two weeks ago.

However, in a sharply worded response to recent comments by the oil minister in Baghdad, the prime minister of the Kurdish autonomous region, Nechirvan Barzani, threatened to secede if Baghdad claimed authority over his region's oil.

"The people of Kurdistan chose to be in a voluntary union with Iraq on the basis of the constitution," he said. "If Baghdad ministers refuse to abide by that constitution, the people of Kurdistan reserve the right to reconsider our choice."

The second ranking US commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, stressed that Washington was looking to Maliki, five months into the job, to give a lead on tackling militias, some of them loyal to his Shiite allies in government:

"We have to fix this militia issue," he said. "But I have to trust the prime minister to decide when it is that we do that."

Meanwhile, two Iraqi soldiers were killed and 10 more injured early yesterday when a suicide car bomb slammed into a checkpoint in northeast Baghdad, police said.

The attack came in a neighborhood, that has just been cleared by US and Iraqi troops as part of the Operation Together Forward security drive in the capital.

The top US military spokesman in Iraq, Major General William Caldwell, told reporters on Wednesday there had been a spike in violence in Baghdad with the onset of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and that suicide attacks were at their highest level ever.

``This has been a tough week,'' he said.
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