Al-Maliki Backs Off Remark

On the eve of Sen. Barack Obama's visit to Iraq, its prime minister tried to step back Sunday from an interview in which he appeared to support Obama's plan for troop withdrawal.

The interview with Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki was published Saturday in the online version of Der Spiegel, a German magazine, ahead of the prime minister's visit to Germany. It was widely picked up by U.S. newspapers because it appeared to give an unexpected boost to Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who has called for an expedited withdrawal.

The interview prompted immediate concern from the Bush administration, which called to seek clarification from al-Maliki's office, U.S. officials said.

The back-and-forth between the two governments came as Obama finished a one-day trip to Afghanistan, where he met with President Hamid Karzai for nearly two hours on Sunday. The Illinois senator said that the United States, NATO and Afghanistan must step up their efforts to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida forces and to encourage Pakistan to eliminate terrorist training camps.

But in Iraq, controversy continued to reverberate between the U.S. and Iraqi governments over a weekend news report that al-Maliki expressed support for Obama's proposal to withdraw U.S. combat troops within 16 months.

Diplomats from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad spoke to al-Maliki's advisers on Saturday, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss diplomatic communications. After that communication, the government's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, issued a statement casting doubt on the magazine's rendering of the interview.

"Unfortunately, Der Spiegel was not accurate," al-Dabbagh said by telephone on Sunday.

But the interpreter for the interview works for al-Maliki's office, not the magazine. And in an audio recording of al-Maliki's interview that Der Spiegel provided to The New York Times, al-Maliki seemed to state a clear affinity for Obama's position, bringing it up on his own in an answer to a general question on troop presence.