WASHINGTON & BAGHDAD - The United States is reaching out for talks with some but not all of the insurgent groups fighting US and Iraqi government forces, US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad said Monday.
Speaking on the ABC television network, Khalilzad said he was open for negotiations with any of the various insurgent groups excepting Saddam Hussein loyalists and followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq.
"We are reaching out to everyone but two groups: the Zarqawi group and associated forces who are jihadists... and the Saddamists. Those who want Saddam Hussein to return," Khalilzad said.
Khalilzad gave no details of the groups he hoped to negotiate with, but indicated they were of the minority Sunnis who feel excluded from the political process in Iraq.
He added that other governments in the region had been crucial in making contacts with the insurgents.
"If we want an Iraq that works we need to bring the Sunnis into the political process," he said.
"We have in recent periods sought the help of countries, Sunni Arab countries to facilitate that, to encourage that," he said.
"I believe you cannot win the kind of conflict we are facing by military means alone... You need to have an integrated approach that wins populations over," Khalilzad said.
However, he stressed that no overtures could be made to the Zarqawi group, which he said wanted to foment a civil war, or the Saddam supporters.
"Saddamism is dead, It isn't coming back. I repeat that constantly when I see Sunni leaders."
"The Sunni outreach, as we call it, aims at isolating these two groups and winning over the population away from them."
Meanwhile, a German woman and six Iranian Shiite pilgrims, including two women, have been kidnapped in Iraq in the latest strike against foreigners in the war-torn country.
Germany's ARD public television reported that an unidentified German woman and her driver were seized on Friday, adding that it had obtained a video in which the kidnappers threatened to kill both unless the German government broke off all cooperation with the Iraqi government.
The woman, said to be an archeologist in her 40s who had worked in Iraq for some time and who speaks Arabic, was seized a day before an American, two Canadians and a Briton were also taken hostage in Baghdad.
The German government was attempting "to bring the woman to safety as soon as possible" and has set up a special team to handle the affair, said spokesman Martin Jaeger.
ARD published a photograph on its website showing two blindfolded people kneeling next to three men, their faces hidden by scarves, toting automatic rifles and a grenade-launcher.
A joint US-Iraqi military coordination centre said six Iranian pilgrims, two of them women, had been kidnapped along with their Iraqi guide and driver by gunmen who held up their minibus Monday near Balad north of Baghdad.
The driver was wounded, witnesses reported.
Hundreds of thousands of Iranian pilgrims have visited Shiite holy shrines in Iraq since the fall of Saddam. Six of the 12 imams venerated by Shiites are buried in the Iraqi cities of Karbala, Najaf and Samarra and the northern Baghdad neighbourhood of Kadhimiya.
Dozens of foreigners have been taken hostage in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003, but the number had been in decline in recent months since foreign aid organisations reduced their staffing in the country.
Some foreigners have been murdered by their kidnappers, often by beheading.
The British, US and Canadian embassies were continuing to investigate the disappearance of their nationals.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw spoke of the "presumed abduction" of British aid worker Norman Kember, who along with two Canadians and a US national went missing in a dangerous district of the capital.
Straw ruled out buying Kember's way to freedom, saying: "Our position in terms of paying ransoms has been very clear and consistent. The United Kingdom does not pay ransoms."
Two British hostages have been killed by their captors since a wave of kidnappings of foreigners began in April 2004, a year after the US and British invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.
The British embassy in Baghdad also confirmed that two Britons of Indian origin had been killed and three injured in an ambush on a bus of Shiite pilgrims Monday.
Sheikh Ayad al-Ezzi, an official with the Islamic Party, the main Sunni party in Iraq, was also assassinated by unknown gunmen in western Baghdad on Monday along with two bodyguards.
The Committee of Muslim Scholars, the influential association of Muslim clerics, condemned the killing as did President Jalal Talabani, who said Ezzi was killed "because he rejects violence and terrorism."
Ezzi's murder came two days after a Sunni coalition, the Iraqi Concord Front, urged Sunnis to vote in the December 15 election.
"Not participating in the elections is treason and encourages others to slaughter us," he said.
The inclusion of the disaffected Sunni minority in the political process is considered key to Iraq's future stability.
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