U.S., Rebels in Iraq Talking

BAGHDAD —  Insurgents killed nearly three dozen Iraqis with suicide bombings and gun and mortar fire Sunday as a newly published report detailed direct contacts between leaders of violent rebel groups and high-level U.S. officials attempting to end the attacks.

U.S. officials did not confirm or deny reports that American diplomats had recently met with insurgent commanders, the majority of whom are Sunni Arabs. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. John P. Abizaid, who commands U.S. forces in the region, acknowledged that U.S. and Iraqi officials had met with Sunni leaders, but insisted that they were not prepared to compromise with those who have killed Americans and Iraqis.

As U.S. officials were forced to confront details of reported meetings with insurgent leaders, three suicide bombings took place in and around the northern city of Mosul. In one attack, a suicide bomber wearing explosives blew himself up among a group of guards and day laborers waiting at the gate of an Iraqi military base. The attack killed at least 15 Iraqis.

In another attack, a suicide bomber driving a pickup truck laden with explosives -- covered by melons -- rammed a police station in the city’s busy outdoor produce market, killing seven police officers and two civilians, officials and witnesses said.

“The car bomb exploded when the place was crowded with civilians,” said Yihia Fatah Alla, a 22-year-old vegetable vendor wounded in the attack.

Another suicide bomber wearing explosives blew himself up in a police depot inside Mosul’s Jumhuriya Hospital, where many of those wounded in previous attacks were being treated. The explosion killed at least five police officers.

One U.S. soldier was killed and two injured in a roadside bomb attack in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, the military announced.

At least 1,735 U.S. troops have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. More than 1,200 Iraqis have died in insurgent attacks since the naming of a new Cabinet on April 28.

Relentless and increasingly sophisticated attacks by foreign Islamic militants and members of Iraq’s disgruntled Sunni Arab minority have drained U.S. public support for the war and pressured Bush administration officials to find a speedy resolution to the conflict.

The Sunday Times of London published a report detailing a series of direct meetings between U.S. diplomats and military commanders and members of violent groups, including Ansar al Sunna, an Islamic militant group with links to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

The report said the meetings took place in a villa near the Sunni Triangle city of Balad on June 3 and June 13.

Rumsfeld told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “meetings take place all the time.” The Iraqi government is “not going to try to bring in the people with blood on their hands, for sure, but they’re certainly reaching out continuously and we help to facilitate those from time to time,” he said.

Rumsfeld’s remarks were part of a media offensive by the Bush administration Sunday aimed at reversing growing doubts among Americans that the war in Iraq can be won. President Bush is scheduled to address the nation Tuesday on the issue.

Rumsfeld appeared on three different Sunday talk shows, Abizaid on two, and Vice President Dick Cheney on one. Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, who is on his first visit to the United States since he was chosen to head the interim government, also joined those arguing that the U.S. should maintain its policies in Iraq.

They delivered a similar message: that despite the insurgency’s ability to sustain its deadly attacks, progress was being made in Iraq and those trying to create chaos would eventually be defeated.

Abizaid said he was concerned that declining public support at home could affect U.S. troop morale. “When my soldiers say to me and ask the question whether or not they’ve got support from the American people or not, that worries me, and they are starting to do that,” he said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “American soldiers fight best when they know the people back home are behind them.”

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rumsfeld warned that the violence could get worse as insurgents attempt to disrupt the run-up to elections later this year. He sought to justify contacts with Iraqi militants as a tactic to coax “people to all move toward the support of the government.”

U.S. officials have previously confirmed holding indirect talks with rebel groups using Sunni Arab mediators, but have insisted they would never hold talks with people who have killed Americans or Iraqis.

But according to the Sunday Times report, American officials met with some of the most notorious groups waging war on Jafari’s government and U.S.-led coalition troops, including Ansar al Sunna, which claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing inside the mess hall of a U.S. base near Mosul last December that killed 22 people.

U.S. commanders and leaders of Iraq’s transitional government distinguish groups of non-Iraqi Islamic fighters like the one led by Jordanian-born Abu Musab Zarqawi from nationalist insurgent cells rooted in Iraq’s Sunni Arab communities.

“I would say that U.S. officials and Iraqi officials are looking for the right people in the Sunni community to talk to in order to ensure that the Sunni Arab community ... become part of the political process,” Abizaid, who leads U.S. Central Command, told CNN. “It makes sense to talk to them. We’re not going to compromise with Zarqawi.”

But most analysts agree that the lines are blurred between Iraqi nationalists and foreign fighters responding to a call to religious war by such militants as Bin Laden. Most experts agree there is some level of coordination and cooperation between foreign fighters and Iraqi insurgents.

A U.S. official in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. was not negotiating with insurgents. “We’ve always talked to people, and many of those people have some sort of link to insurgents,” the official said in an e-mail. “It’s hard to gauge how much influence anyone has with insurgents, or to determine which insurgent group they’re associated with for that matter.”

But a high-level U.S. military commander in Iraq, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said earlier that U.S. and Iraqi forces must devise a mechanism that allows even hard-core insurgents to lay down their arms.

“We talked to the Germans and Japanese at the end of World War II,” he said in an interview. “You cannot have a peace if you do not have negotiations, if you do not have talks. Right now, there have been no serious discussions, so the insurgents, some of whom probably are fighting for a nationalistic point of view, they think they’re trying to do the right thing by trying to run the coalition out.”

He said that a message should be sent to insurgents and effectively state: “If you didn’t murder anybody, if you did not saw anybody’s head off and put it on the Internet, if you are not directly responsible for murder and terrorist acts, you are hereby pardoned. That pardon is contingent on you laying down arms, and fighting no more, forever.”

Despite a string of high-profile military operations meant to squash rebel strongholds, insurgents often manage to regain footholds. Violent attacks in Mosul have increased since U.S.-led forces attempted to root out insurgents there late last year. Authorities in the ethnically mixed city have shut down all but three police stations out of fear of attacks.

The 7 a.m. bombing in the produce market collapsed the front of the police building. The blast was followed by mortar rounds directed at the area. By late morning, the market -- normally bustling with workers unloading produce crates from trucks and customers shopping for fruit -- was deserted.

In Baghdad, insurgents shot dead a high-level police official on his way to work and fired a mortar shell that landed in the Baladiyat neighborhood, killing one woman and her two sons, police said.

Insurgents also launched attacks in Kirkuk, striking police patrols with a roadside bomb and a car bomb in two separate incidents. At least seven officers were wounded.

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Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in Washington and Patrick J. McDonnell in Baghdad and special correspondents in Mosul and Kirkuk contributed to this report.