by Paul Schemm1 hour, 9 minutes ago
Iraq held the first meeting of a homegrown peace initiative, with the country's top leaders vowing to reconcile the warring factions amid protests over US meddling.
"This is an Iraqi initiative for those who are part of the political process," Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told reporters, while the speaker of parliament urged US-led coalition forces not to interfere.
Maliki said Saturday the Supreme Committee for National Reconciliation had already received positive signals from some of the insurgent groups battling security forces and US troops, including one led by a former army officer.
Parliament speaker Mahmud Mashhadani, a conservative Sunni Islamist, said the committee would work to persuade groups which have opposed the political process to lay down their arms.
"We will contact those who oppose us on certain issues and will try to convince them and tell them the detail of the project to win their consent," he said, standing alongside Maliki and President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd.
Soon after the announcement seven Shiite construction workers were gunned down in a Sunni neighborhood of west Baghdad.
Separately, US troops in Musayyib, south of Baghdad, fired back on ambushers armed with automatic weapons and rocket launchers, killing 14 of them, a US spokesman said.
Maliki's government and the coalition have been struggling to contain a wave of sectarian violence in which rival Shiite and Sunni death squads have killed hundreds of civilians around the capital in the past month.
With a month-old security operation apparently making little headway, Iraqi leaders hope the reconciliation committee will draw in those groups prepared to compromise, while isolating violent extremists.
Those who oppose his government's policies are free to do so, the prime minister said, but those who reject the peace process in favor of violence would be "pushed into a corner".
The government announced the reconciliation program on June 25 in response to increasing violence, which has been fueled in part by extremist militant groups aiming to provoke a full-out civil war.
"I don't think Al-Qaeda has been successful in its objective, but I admit there are cracks in national unity," said National Security Advisor Ahmed al-Rubaie.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI) opened a conference on transitional justice and national reconciliation meant to support the government efforts.
But parliament speaker Mashhadani ruffled feathers when he gave a combative opening address in which he blamed many of Iraq's problems on US forces, and called for foreigners to end their interference.
"Just get your hands off Iraq and the Iraqi people and Muslim countries, and everything will be alright," he said, addressing coalition forces.
"What has been done in Iraq is a kind of butchery of the Iraqi people," he said in a long speech that criticized the tactics of the coalition forces in Iraq and US support for Israeli strikes against Lebanon.
Mashhadani bluntly told his audience of UN officials, foreign experts, politicians and civil society representatives that Iraqis had little use for advice on running their country or foreign-sponsored conferences.
"What we need is reconciliation between Iraqis only -- there can be no third party," he said.
UN representatives were quick to emphasize that the world body was there to advise and offer examples from other countries in transition, rather than to dictate policy.
In addition to the seven construction workers killed in Baghdad, eight other Iraqis, all but one of them members of the security forces, died in attacks around the country Saturday. The bodies of 12 murder victims were also found.
Two rockets also hit the heavily-fortified Green Zone, the seat of US and government power in the capital, but there were no initial damage reports.