US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani today to discuss control of oil resources in the autonomous region of Kurdistan.
Ms Rice, visiting Iraq at the end of a Middle East tour, flew to northern Kurdish region after talks in Baghdad where she urged Iraqi politicians to unite and rein in sectarian violence.
A US state department official said that Ms Rice wanted to urge Kurdish leaders to work with Sunni and Shia Arabs, particularly on the controversial issue of managing Iraq's vast oil wealth.
The meeting with Mr Barzani, the president of Kurdistan, came as the Iraqi government is drafting legislation to clarify how oil investment and revenues should be shared with a view to encouraging foreign investment to develop its vast resources.
"As for the revenues of oil . . . we favour a fair distribution of oil revenues all over Iraq," Mr Barzani said after the talks. Ms Rice did not mention oil in their joint a news conference.
In a latest tension between Kurds and Arabs over oil, the Kurdish regional government last month raised the threat of secession if the Baghdad government did not drop claims to a say in development of oil resources in their northern districts.
Mr 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.
Kurdish leaders are mindful of their landlocked region's dependence on its neighbours, however, and the opposition to independence from their US ally, as well as hostility from Turkey, Iran and Syria, which have restless Kurdish minorities of their own.