Aswat al-Iraq: A lawmaker from Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militias rejected on Saturday a visit by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte to Iraq, adding the visit only aims to press Iraqis into signing a security agreement with Washington. "The U.S. administration, through Negroponte, is trying to add certain items that impinge upon Iraq's sovereignty," Aqeel Abdelhussein told Aswat al-Iraq. "We reject these visits altogether and urge the Iraqi side to maintain the country's sovereignty and also to negotiate the occupation forces' withdrawal from Iraq," he said.
Abdelhussein, whose Sadrist bloc occupies 30 out of a total 275 seats in the Iraqi parliament, said that Iraq would be in no need of such agreement, particularly after the Iraqi army succeeded to fine-tune security conditions. "The agreement would lead Iraq to a dark tunnel," he said, ruling out that this agreement would be signed this year due to many outstanding problems in its items.
The U.S. embassy in Baghdad had announced on Friday evening that Negroponte arrived on an unannounced visit to Iraq for talks with Iraqi officials on political, security and economic progress in Iraq.