France Offers U.S. Symbol With Iraq Trip

A man injured in a mortar attack rests at a hospital in the Shiite enclave of Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq on Sunday, Aug. 19, 2007. A mortar barrage slammed into a mainly Shiite east Baghdad neighborhood of Ubaidi Sunday, killing 12 and wounding 31, police said. (AP Photo/ Karim Kadim) (Karim Kadim - AP)

BAGHDAD -- France's foreign minister paid an unannounced and highly symbolic visit to Baghdad on Sunday _ the first by a senior French official since the war started and a gesture to the American effort in Iraq after years of icy relations over the U.S.-led invasion. Bernard Kouchner said Paris wanted to "turn the page" and look to the future.

A top American general, meanwhile, said Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard had 50 men training Shiite militiamen in remote camps south of Baghdad.

On Monday, a roadside bomb killed the governor of the southern Muthanna province, police said, the second assassination of a top provincial official in just over a week. The governor and police chief of another southern province, Qadasiyah, also were killed in a roadside bombing attack on Aug. 11.

Both governors were members of the influential Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, a group led by Shiite politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim whose loyalists have been fighting the Mahdi Army militia for control of the oil-rich south.

Kouchner said he was not in Iraq to offer initiatives or proposals but to listen to ideas on how his country might help stop the devastating violence.

"Now we are turning the page. There is a new perspective. We want to talk about the future. Democracy, integrity, sovereignty, reconciliation and stopping the killings. That's my deep aim," Kouchner said in English after meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hosyhar Zebari.

"We hope that this visit will herald an increased level of engagement by France with Iraq, a level consistent with the activism of its foreign minister," Zebari said, pointing to Kouchner's humanitarian efforts as the former U.N. administrator for Kosovo and co-founder of the Nobel Prize-winning aid group Doctors Without Borders.

Kouchner drove from the airport in a heavily armored convoy, stopping first at the U.N. compound in the Green Zone at a memorial to victims of the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad that killed U.N. special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 other people. The two men were friends.

Kouchner said he timed his arrival to mark the fourth anniversary of the attack.

Asked at a news conference if France was now ready to help the Americans who are mired in Iraq, the top French diplomat demurred and said he was on a fact-finding mission.

"We are ready to be useful, but the solution is in the Iraqis hands, not in the French hands," he said, adding "I'm not frightened of the perspective of talking to the Americans."

Kouchner later met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Shiite leader struggling to save his crumbling government, a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information.