Biden meets Iraqi PM to discuss U.S. troop withdrawal

By Tim Cocks and Ahmed Rasheed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President-elect Joe Biden met Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad on Tuesday to discuss withdrawing U.S. troops, seen as a major challenge for the incoming U.S. administration.

"Senator Joe Biden asserted the importance of cooperation ... to implement the foreign troop withdrawal agreement signed by the two countries," Maliki's office said, referring to a deal that requires U.S. troops leave Iraq by the end of 2011.

The visit comes a week before Biden takes office with President-elect Barack Obama.

As violence in Iraq falls to lows rarely seen since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, U.S. forces are increasingly taking a back seat to Iraqi troops under a new bilateral security deal, which took effect at the start of the year.

Later on Tuesday, Maliki and outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice led the first round of top level meetings over future relations between their two countries since the agreement took effect. Rice participated by video conference.

The security pact calls for U.S. combat troops to leave Iraqi cities by the middle of this year and for all troops to withdraw by the end of 2011. A separate long-term agreement is meant to govern ties in security, politics, trade and culture.

MILESTONE

Both countries have described the deals as a milestone on Iraq's path to full sovereignty, nearly six years since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Biden, a Delaware senator and long-time chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, visited Baghdad as part of a tour that also took him to Afghanistan, where Obama plans to increase troops as he withdraws them from Iraq.

After talks in Baghdad, Biden flew to Kirkuk -- where disputes between Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen over territory threaten to reignite violence -- and met with local officials.

Biden's arrival on Monday coincided with a wave of bombings across the capital that killed at least seven and wounded 30, a reminder of simmering unrest despite an end to rampant sectarian killing that nearly tipped Iraq into all-out civil war.

Baghdad was quieter on Tuesday, but a blast in Adhamiya district described by police as a mortar attack wounded seven.

Biden is one of the few members of the U.S. Senate with a high profile in Iraq, where he is known as author of a 2006 plan to split it into self-ruled Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish enclaves.

That plan angered many Iraqi politicians, and was quietly put aside as violence ebbed.

(Additional reporting by Aseel Kami; Writing by Tim Cocks; Editing by Louise Ireland)