BAGHDAD - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised Iraq's leaders on Tuesday for passing the first in a series of critical laws aimed at reconciling warring Iraqis but said more progress was needed.
Rice held talks with Shi'ite Islamist Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki after arriving on an unannounced visit and then met Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari, President Jalal Talabani and Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani, officials said.
Washington wants Maliki's splintered government to match recent security gains with progress on political reconciliation between majority Shi'ite and minority Sunni Muslims.
Iraq's parliament voted on Saturday to let thousands of members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party return to government jobs, the first of a group of what Washington has called benchmark reconciliation laws to be passed.
"This law ... is clearly a step forward for national reconciliation, it is clearly a step forward for the process of healing the wounds of the past," Rice told a news conference.
The laws, which also include a bill on sharing oil revenues and another on provincial elections, are designed to draw Sunni Arabs, who were dominant under Saddam, back into the political process and away from Iraq's bloody insurgency.
There has been no sign of any significant progress on either the oil law or the provincial elections bill.
"Yes, there is still a lot of work to be done. I talked with the leaders today about a provincial powers law, about the need for provincial elections, we talked about the need for a hydrocarbons law," she said.
"While it has not always moved as fast as some of us sitting in Washington would like, it has certainly moved," she said of Iraq's political progress.
