US Speaker Pelosi arrives in Baghdad

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.