Rice flies to Arbil to meet Iraqi Kurdish leaders

ARBIL, Iraq, Oct 6 (Reuters) US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will urge Iraqi Kurdish leaders today to work with Sunnis and Shi'ites, particularly on the controversial issue of managing Iraq's vast oil wealth.

Rice, on a visit to Iraq, pressed Iraqi leaders yesterday to end their ''political inaction'' and put aside their differences to rein in sectarian violence that threatens to tear the country apart.

Witnesses said Rice, who arrived in the autonomous region of Kurdistan today, was meeting Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish region.

US officials said Rice would stress the importance of the Kurds finding a compromise on a new Iraqi law to govern its energy sector.

Barzani, one of the guerrilla leaders who wrenched the mountainous north from Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Gulf War, often refers to Kurdistan's right to secede if the US-backed project to establish a decentralised federal democracy fails.

Largely free of Baghdad's control for 15 years and spared the violence that followed the US invasion in 2003, the Kurds have prospered. But their territorial designs on Iraq's northern oilfields around Kirkuk are a potential flashpoint for violence.

Kurdish leaders are mindful of their landlocked region's dependence on its neighbours and the opposition to independence from their US ally, as well as the outright hostility from Turkey, Iran and Syria, which have restless Kurdish minorities of their own.

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