BAGHDAD, Iraq – Syria’s foreign minister called Sunday for a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces to help end Iraq’s sectarian bloodbath, in a groundbreaking diplomatic mission to Iraq that comes amid increasing calls for the U.S. to seek cooperation from Syria and Iran.
At least 112 people were killed nationwide, following a week that had already seen hundreds of deaths.
Walid Moallem, the highest-level Syrian official to visit since the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein, denounced terrorism in Iraq even as Washington mulled its own overture to Damascus for help in ending Iraq’s violence.
In one of the most significant diplomatic breakthroughs since the ouster of Hussein, a restoration of contacts between Damascus and Baghdad was seen as a means of convincing Damascus to exert tighter control over its border.
The frontier has been a major crossing point for Sunni Arab fighters who infiltrate to join the insurgency that has been responsible for the deaths of most U.S. soldiers since the American led invasion in 2003.
Moallem spoke at the end of a day in which a suicide bomber in the predominantly Shiite city of Hillah south of Baghdad lured men to his minivan with promises of a day’s work as laborers, then blew it up, killing at least 22 and wounding 44, police said.
Babil province police Capt. Muthana Khalid said three suspected terrorists, two Egyptians and an Iraqi, were arrested on suspicion of planning the suicide attack with the bomber, a Syrian.
By luring workers to his bomb, the suicide attacker used a technique has been employed repeatedly in poor Shiite regions throughout Iraq where unemployment is especially high and men often must hire themselves out daily to feed their families. Sunday is a working day in mostly Muslim Iraq.
Within hours, a roadside bomb and two car bombs exploded one after another near a bus station in Mashtal, a mostly Shiite area of southeastern Baghdad, killing 11 and wounding 51, police said.
Besides the victims of the bombings in Hillah and Baghdad, at least 23 other people were killed nationwide. In addition, the bodies of 56 murder victims, many of them tortured, were dumped in three Iraqi cities, 45 of them in Baghdad alone.
Even as diplomacy gained some traction with the visit of the Syrian foreign minister, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who negotiated an end to the Vietnam War more than 30 years ago, said a conventional victory was no longer an option for Washington.
“If you mean, by ‘military victory,’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” he told the BBC’s Sunday AM program.
Kissinger has also said Iran and Syria need to be drawn into efforts to curb the violence.
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