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On the rebel side were representatives of insurgent groups including Ansar al-Sunna, which has carried out numerous suicide bombings and killed 22 people in the dining hall of an American base at Mosul last Christmas.

Also represented was the so-called Islamic Army in Iraq, which murdered Enzo Baldoni, an Italian journalist, last August; the Iraqi Liberation Army; Jaish Mohammed and other smaller factions. According to an Iraqi commander, one of the Americans introduced himself as “a representative of the Pentagon” and declared himself ready to “find ways of stopping the bloodshed on both sides and to listen to demands and grievances”.

The US officer also indicated that the contents of any discussion would be relayed to his superiors in Washington.

The Americans were then said to have launched into a lengthy session of questioning about the structure of the insurgency, which is far from a unified entity.
Coalition military intelligence has identified at least four separate strands of anti-American opposition, including Zarqawi’s jihadists, former members of Saddam’s regime, Sunni Arab nationalists and criminal gangs.

The links between these groups remain murky and the American team began to irritate the Iraqis with what some saw as a crude attempt to gather intelligence. They asked questions about the “hierarchy and logistics of the groups, how they functioned, how orders were dispatched, how they divide their work and so on”, the Iraqi source said.

“It was a boring line of questioning that indicated an attempt to discover more about their enemy than about finding solutions,” one of the sources added. “We told the translator to inform them that if they persisted with this line we would all walk out of the meeting.”

The Iraqis had agreed beforehand to focus on their main demand, “a guaranteed timetable of American withdrawal from Iraq”, the source said. “We told them it did not matter whether we are talking about one year or a five-year plan but that we insisted on having a timetable nonetheless.”

The demand did not meet with a favourable response from the American team, perhaps because a timetable is the one thing that President George W Bush has declared he will not agree to.

Both Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, insisted last week that setting a timetable would be an invitation to the insurgents to “wait us out”, as the president put it.

Ibrahim al-Jafaari, the Iraqi prime minister, also rejected a timetable during his first visit to the White House on Friday. Bush reassured him: “This is an enemy that will be defeated . . . You don’t have to worry, Mr Prime Minister, about timetables.”

The insurgents went on to demand US compensation for the damage caused by the American military occupation. One group put in a bid for Saddam to be restored to power, but not even his colleagues appeared to be taking that seriously.

The original discussion is said to have lasted for an hour and a half and to have broken up with the US team explaining that it would need to consult Washington. But one American official apparently asked whether the insurgents would be interested in disarming in return for a release of all Iraqi prisoners in US military camps.

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