Iraq hints at dialogue with insurgents

"We have received calls from people who said they belonged to armed groups," Talabani's national security advisor Lieutenant-General Wafeeq al-Sammarai told AFP, adding that the callers "said they were ready to join the political process."

They included Islamists and Baathists from the now banned party of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, said Sammarai, who was the head of Iraqi military intelligence in the 1991 Gulf War.

At a meeting of Iraqi political leaders in Cairo last weekend, Talabani said he was prepared to talk to rebels in a bid to end the deadly insurgency that has gripped the country since Saddam's downfall in 2003.

"If those who describe themselves as the Iraqi resistance want to get in touch with me, they are welcome to do so," Talabani said.

The Cairo meeting was held to pave the ground for a reconciliation conference next year in Baghdad and to encourage minority Sunni Arabs, seen as backing the insurgency, to join the political process instead.

Sammarai gave no further details on which rebel groups might have been in touch, or how much of a following they might have within the insurgency which US forces described as multi-faceted.

In violence on Saturday, a suicide bomber drove his pickup truck into a crowded gas station north of Baghdad yesterday and killed 12 people while a second car bomb targeting a convoy of foreigners killed four others in the capital, police said.

In central Baghdad, a parked car bomb detonated when two armoured cars carrying foreigners drove by, killing four Iraqi civilians, Lt. Thaer Mahmoud said. No one in the convoy was injured, but one of the armoured cars was damaged and removed by US forces, Mahmoud said. The foreigners were not immediately identified, but none of them were injured, he added.

More than 250 people have been killed since Nov. 18 in car bombings and suicide attacks against Shia targets.

US officials hope that a big Sunni turnout will encourage members of the community to turn away from the insurgency, hastening the day when American and other international troops can go home. Sunnis form about 20 percent of Iraq's 27 million people but are the backbone of the insurgency.