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Baghdad: Iraqi leaders agreed on Saturday to renew efforts to form a national unity government. President George W. Bush spoke on Saturday with seven leaders of Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish political parties in a bid to defuse the sectarian crisis unleashed by the bombing of the Shiites' Askariya shrine in Samarra. The US president's personal intervention appeared to ease Sunni fears and give new impetus to political moves to resolve the crisis. During a late night meeting at Prime Minister Ebrahim Al Jaafari's residence, representatives of Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish parties agreed to renew efforts to form a national unity government. Arab Sunni politicians, who had pulled out of talks on the government after attacks on their community, attended the meeting, as did US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad.
"I am very happy and very optimistic," Al Jaafari said. "Our people are very far from civil war and everyone asserted that the first enemy of Iraqis is terrorism and there isn't a Sunni who is against a Shiite or a Shiite who is against a Sunni." Sunni leaders did not explicitly say they would end their boycott of coalition talks. But a Sunni leader, Tariq Al Hashimi, said all sides are in agreement that one of the solutions to the sectarian crisis "is to form the government as soon as possible."
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