Rice in Iraq

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a surprise visit to Iraq yesterday to discuss how to fight the escalating insurgency, and authorities said they found the bodies of 34 men killed by guerillas.

Ms Rice arrived under heavy security to meet Iraqi leaders grappling with a explosion of attacks that have killed more than 400 people since a new government was named on April 28.

She said she wanted to discuss ways to move the political process forward to help quell the insurgency.

"The Iraqis... are now going to have to intensify their efforts to demonstrate that in fact the political process is the answer for the Iraqi people," she told reporters on her plane before arriving in Arbil, 350 kilometres north of Baghdad.

In the latest of the catalogue of violence, four police officers and two civilians were killed when two suicide bombers attacked the convoy of Raad Rashid, governor of Diyala province, in the town of Baquba northeast of Baghdad. He escaped unharmed.

Police said they found the handcuffed bodies of 13 people shot dead and left in a Baghdad garbage dump. The bodies of 10 Iraqi soldiers killed by insurgents were discovered on Saturday dumped in Ramadi, about 110 kilometres west of Baghdad.

In a further grisly discovery, police said the bodies of 11 Iraqis, four of them beheaded, were found in Iskandariya, south of the capital in an area known as the "triangle of death".

In eastern Baghdad, gunmen killed Qasim al-Gharrawi, a cleric who was the local representative of Iraq's most revered Shi'ite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, officials said.

Killings of clerics, as well as suicide bomb attacks targeting Shi'ite Muslims, have fuelled fears that insurgents are trying to stoke civil war between Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs. The insurgency is dominated by Sunni fighters.

Insurgents have freed Raja Nawaf, governor of Iraq's rebellious Anbar province, who was kidnapped last week, an Interior Ministry official said. Mr Nawaf had been abducted with four bodyguards during a US military operation against guerillas in his province on the Syrian border.

After her arrival in Arbil, Ms Rice donned body armour for her helicopter flight to the nearby town of Salahaddin for talks with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani before moving on to Baghdad.

In Baghdad, Ms Rice thanked several hundred US troops and diplomats for their service in Iraq. She suggested that its liberation from Saddam Hussein would someday be compared to the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe.

She was due to hold talks with Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, President Jalal Talabani and the new defence and interior ministers later yesterday, and was also expected to meet Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial former exile who was once a Pentagon favourite, but fell out of favour with Washington.

Ms Rice is the most senior US official to visit Iraq since Jaafari, a Shi'ite Islamist, formed his government.

Ms Rice said she would also discuss reconstruction efforts and plans for a conference sponsored by the United States and European Union next month.

She played down concerns about political bickering that delayed the formation of a Cabinet until three months after the January 30 elections.

"If I am surprised by anything, it is that they have been able to do it (in three months)," she told reporters.

Government spokesman Laith Kubba suggested that disgruntled former supporters of Saddam Hussein were behind many of the car bombings and assassinations plaguing Iraq.