Baghdad - Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of
Representatives, arrived in Baghdad on Sunday morning, Iraqi state
television reported.
Pelosi will meet with Speaker of the Iraqi Parliament Iyad
al-Samarrai to discuss means of strengthening cooperation between the
US Congress and the Iraqi parliament. Iraqi television provided no
further details on the US congresswoman's visit.
Pelosi, an outspoken critic of the former US administration's
handling of the war in Iraq, has visited the country twice since
2007.
Her visit on Sunday comes at the tail of the bloodiest month in
Iraq this year. At least 300 people, most of the Shiite Muslims from
Baghdad, were killed in a series of bomb attacks over the course of
April.
On Sunday morning, police General Jaafar Taama al-Khafaji narrowly
escaped an assassination attempt when a car bomb in central Baghdad's
al-Andalus Square exploded as his convoy passed by, police said.
The general, who is in charge of the Interior Ministry's traffic
department, was wounded in the attack, which police called an
assassination attempt, but was expected to survive.
The attempted assassination followed Saturday's fatal shooting of
police General Hakim Jassim in the Zubair district of the southern
Iraqi city of Basra and the fatal shooting of an off-duty police
officer in a central market in the northern city of Mosul.
Under the terms of a US-Iraqi agreement governing the presence of
US forces in Iraq, US soldiers are scheduled to withdraw from Iraqi
cities and towns by the end of June, and to withdraw from the country
completely by 2011.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in March said the Iraqi
government might ask US soldiers to stay in the most violence-prone
areas of the country past the June deadline, but in more recent
comments has said he expects US forces to withdraw on schedule.
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