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Mortars hit Baghdad Green Zone during Biden visit
Tue Sep 15, 2009 2:43pm EDT
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By Ross Colvin
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Militants fired several mortars or rockets at Baghdad's fortified Green Zone government district on Tuesday shortly after U.S. Vice President Joe Biden flew in to keep pressure on Iraqi leaders to make political compromises.
Iraqi police said two out of four suspected mortar rounds landed near the sprawling U.S. embassy compound in the Green Zone, but did not hit it. Biden had met with the U.S. ambassador, Chris Hill, and the senior U.S. military commander, General Ray Odierno, just before the mortar strikes.
Biden was safe in an undisclosed location, aides said. His whereabouts were being kept under wraps for security reasons.
A briefing for journalists by Hill and Odierno was interrupted by the sound of explosions. A loudspeaker at the embassy broadcast a warning to duck and take cover.
The U.S. military said it knew of only one blast, which hit close to the Green Zone but not inside it.
It was Biden's second trip to Iraq in three months, and the visit signaled that the Obama administration is anxious to resolve long-standing disputes between Kurdish, Shi'ite and Sunni Arab communities over land and oil that U.S. officials fear could yet rip apart the country.
After his meeting with Hill and Odierno, Biden said a national election in January was the key to resolving those differences, which have in recent weeks been on open display through public quarrelling over who was to blame for bomb attacks.
"I think a successful election is the necessary condition for those outstanding political questions to be resolved ... most of the parties ... feel the same way," Biden said.
Violence has dropped sharply in Iraq since the height of a wave of sectarian killings in 2006, due in part to a so-called "surge" of tens of thousands of U.S. troops, but the security gains have not been matched by much political progress.
"I don't think necessarily the result of a failed political process is civil war," Hill said. "The threat is the political process will not give the country sufficient cohesion to work on its economic issues and otherwise to become a strong and stable factor in the region."
U.S. TROOPS TO LEAVE
Iraq's security gains remain fragile, as evidenced by Tuesday's rocket and mortar attacks and two giant truck bombs on August 19 that killed 95 people at the foreign and finance ministries and shattered public confidence in Iraq's security.
Iraq's Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has accused supporters of Saddam Hussein's outlawed Baath party of plotting the attacks from neighboring Syria, triggering a diplomatic clash with Damascus that Iraq's president, an ethnic Kurd, and two vice presidents have sharply criticized.
"We do know there are some expat settlements that are inside Syria that are funding operations inside Iraq," Odierno said. "We have to continue to press Syria to take actions against some of these elements that continue to attempt to create instability inside Iraq."
Odierno also said he continued to see the security situation in Iraq as stable, shortly before the first loud explosion interrupted his remarks. Continued...
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