Rice Meets With Troops, Leaders on Visit to Iraq

By Louise Roug

May 16, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

BAGHDAD — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice whisked in for a one-day visit to Iraq on Sunday, speaking to troops and meeting with Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari and other leaders as a wave of violence in the country intensified.

Prepared in secrecy and conducted under heavy security, the trip was Rice’s first to Iraq as the top U.S. diplomat. She had visited as national security advisor in 2003, accompanying President Bush on a surprise Thanksgiving Day call on American troops.

On Sunday, Rice met with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani north of Baghdad before flying to the capital, where she touched down for a news conference in the heavily fortified Green Zone. There she met with Jafari and Ahmad Chalabi, the former Washington favorite who is now a deputy prime minister.

Rice praised the transitional government, sworn in this month after three months of political wrangling. It is charged with drafting a new constitution by Aug. 15, though that deadline may be extended.

“Things do not happen overnight,” Rice said, appearing with Jafari. “Iraq is emerging from a long national nightmare of tyranny.”

Her surprise visit came on a day of continued violence that has claimed at least 430 lives in little more than two weeks.

Northeast of the capital, in Baqubah, at least six people were killed and 37 injured Sunday in a coordinated attack on a convoy carrying the governor of Diyala province, officials said.

A car bomber targeted the convoy at 8:30 a.m., and shortly afterward a suicide attacker wearing a police uniform blew himself up near a group of police officers and civilians that had gathered. Suspicious officers had started questioning the second bomber when the explosives were detonated, said Lt. Col. Sabah Saleh Mahdi, the Baqubah police commander.

“Indeed, I was targeted by the suicide car bomber,” said the governor, Raed Rashid. “I tell those people that these criminal actions won’t bend us from helping and serving the people of this province.”

A leading Shiite cleric and a Sunni cleric associated with the Muslim Scholars Assn. were also killed in separate incidents. And Associated Press reported that gunmen had assassinated an Industry Ministry official.

In Al Anbar province west of the capital, where U.S. Marines just concluded a weeklong offensive, Gov. Raja Nawaf was released after five days in captivity. The kidnappers, allegedly affiliated with Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi, threatened to kill Nawaf unless the Americans left the area near the Syrian border.

Times staff writers Raheem Salman and Zainab Hussein in Baghdad and a special correspondent in Baqubah contributed to this report.