Iraqi leaders embark on reconciliation quest

Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak gave opening speeches amid tight security outside the League's headquarters by the Nile.

Mubarak said the meetings were an "essential condition" for a progressive departure of the 170,000 US-led foreign troops in Iraq.

The talks are to prepare for a larger conference to take place in Iraq but officials are hoping they will provide an opportunity to start ironing out differences between the country's feuding communities.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari said on Friday that the meeting was "part of steps aimed at promoting the political process in Iraq" and called on all sides to demonstrate "goodwill towards achieving positive results."

"We support any step which might contribute to stability," Jaafari told reporters on arrival in Cairo.

The meetings gather representatives of the disenchanted Sunni former elite, as well as the newly empowered Shiite majority and the non-Arab Kurds.

The Sunni Arab minority, which dominated Saddam Hussein's regime and all previous Iraqi governments, has largely stood aloof from the political process since his overthrow, providing the backbone of the persistent insurgency.

Sunni leaders, for their part, charge that Kurdish and Shiite leaders are seeking to marginalise their community and are bitter over a constitution that many Sunnis charge could hasten the break-up of Iraq.

Also due at the meeting are Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, Vice President Ghazi al-Yawar, a Sunni, the head of the main Sunni clerics' association, Hareth al-Dari, and the head of the largest Sunni political faction, the Islamic Party, Tareq al-Hashemi.

Earlier fifteen people were killed when a car bomb exploded in a busy Baghdad market yesterday as the search resumed amid the rubble of two Shia mosques where at least 75 died in twin suicide bombings a day earlier.

The latest attack, which targeted a local market in the Jesir Diyala district of southern Baghdad, was followed 90 minutes later by another car bomb attack in the centre of the capital, an interior ministry official said.