Time of US pressure in Iraq is over: Maliki

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told reporters yesterday that the time when the United States could put pressure on Iraq had passed.
"The time for putting pressure on Iraq is over," Maliki said, referring to comments by US Vice President Joe Biden who last week urged the Baghdad government to speed the pace of political reform in the war-torn country.
"The Iraqi government knows what are its responsibilities. We are carrying out reform and we are in the last step of the reconciliation," the premier added.
Biden said on Friday that the United States would have to be more aggressive in prodding the Iraq government on forging political reform.
He said that January 31 provincial elections in Iraq had shown that progress was being made, but more needed to be done as the country's leaders had not "gotten their political arrangements together yet."
In fresh violence, four American soldiers and an interpreter were killed in a suicide car bombing in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Monday, in the deadliest attack since last May, the US military said.
It said three soldiers were killed on the spot while a fourth and the interpreter died later of their wounds when the suicide bomber's car exploded near their vehicle.
The US military considers Mosul, 370 kilometres (225 miles) from Baghdad, to be al-Qaeda's last urban stronghold in Iraq. A total of 26 US soldiers have now been killed in the Mosul region over the past year.