WASHINGTON, March 26 (Reuters) - The outgoing U.S. ambassador to Iraq held talks last year with representatives of major Iraqi insurgent groups, according to a newspaper interview on Monday which said this was the first public U.S. acknowledgment of such contacts. "There were discussions with the representatives of various groups in the aftermath of the elections, and during the formation of the government before the Samarra incident, and some discussions afterwards as well," The New York Times quoted Zalmay Khalilzad as saying. Some Bush administration officials have publicly expressed an unwillingness to negotiate with Iraqi insurgents, the Times said. The newspaper said the meetings began in early 2006 and may have been the first efforts at sustained contacts between senior U.S. officials and the Sunni Arab insurgency. Khalilzad flew to Jordan for some of the talks, it said. Khalilzad declined to give details on the effort, but the Times cited other officials as saying it foundered after the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra triggered waves of sectarian violence. It cited a U.S. official as saying it was hard to confirm whether the people Khalilzad met really were influential representatives of the insurgent groups and that the insurgency's command was fractured. "We were never able to find people who could reduce the violence," the newspaper quoted the official as saying. The Times said U.S. officials have privately acknowledged some contacts with insurgent representatives as early as autumn 2005. President George W. Bush has nominated Khalilzad to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Khalilzad reiterated to the Times his view that the U.S. and Iraqi governments should consider granting amnesty to insurgents -- an idea U.S. opponents from both major parties criticize as an insult to U.S. troops who have died fighting in Iraq. "This is something that we and Iraqis, the government, will do together, and there are various types of amnesties," he said. "But the fundamental point, the goal of bringing the war to an end, the most important tribute we could pay to our soldiers who have lost their lives here would be that the cause they fought for would be embraced and accepted by their former enemies, by those who fought them," he said.
