DOUBTS about the authority and influence of insurgent leaders are complicating the Pentagon’s attempts to negotiate with Sunni rebels in the hope of isolating Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, and other foreign terrorists who have flooded into the country to fight American troops.

Despite clandestine negotiations with Iraqi insurgent groups, US officials are still uncertain that they are speaking to the real leaders of the minority Sunni rebellion against democratic rule.

“It is difficult to know which of these guys can speak with any authority,” a senior Washington official said last week. “It’s all pretty ambivalent and we have no confidence in any figure we see on the number of insurgents represented.”

The talks with insurgent groups, first reported by The Sunday Times last week, were confirmed by Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, who portrayed them as part of a US effort to “reach out” to opponents of the new Iraqi government.

Disclosure of the talks provoked sharp reactions in Washington, where right-wing conservatives expressed shock that the US had been negotiating with terrorists. Others characterised the talks as a sensible development that reflected a more realistic approach from the White House to a war that is arousing increasing concern among American voters.

There was also chagrin in American media circles that another big story concerning the US management of the war had been broken by a British newspaper. The Washington Post’s website noted that weeks after The Sunday Times published the now notorious Downing Street memo on US preparations for war, it had once again proved “quicker than any American news organisation to document the gap between the rhetoric and reality of US policy in Iraq”.

Senior Washington sources said “lots of ideas were being kicked around” in continuing talks with Sunni leaders. These included a possible amnesty for Iraqi fighters; cash payments to tribal sheikhs who guaranteed peace in the districts they controlled; and a possible South African-style truth and reconciliation commission at which grievances might be aired.

The main problem, one source familiar with the talks explained, was that some of the insurgent groups appeared more interested in arguing with each other than in negotiating with the Americans.

The divisions in Sunni ranks were underlined last week when some of the insurgent groups reported to have been present at the talks denied they were negotiating with the Americans. They issued a death threat against Ayham al-Samurai, a former Sunni exile who was reported to have helped to set up the talks. Samurai announced last week he had formed a new political organisation that would include Iraqis with links to insurgent groups.

A joint statement issued by Ansar al-Sunna, the Islamic Army in Iraq and the Mujahideen Army denounced Samurai for claiming he was the “mouthpiece of the resistance”. It added: “We will not talk to the occupation forces except with one language, the language of weapons.”

These contradictions seemed to confirm what many coalition commanders have long suspected: that insurgent groups are very loosely organised with few central command structures, making it hard for US officials to judge who can speak with authority.

British officials are also believed to be negotiating with insurgent groups in southern areas. One senior source noted that some tribal leaders had grandfathers who had been paid off by the British agents running Iraq in the 1920s. Dealing with the locals was a “British forte”, the source said.

Conservatives surprised by last week’s report were initially reluctant to criticise President George W Bush, who last week travelled to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to deliver a major speech urging patience on Iraq. But by the end of the week, cracks were appearing in Republican lines and one conservative columnist blasted the administration for taking “tea with terrorists”.

“Aren’t we the people who don’t negotiate with terrorists?” asked Diana West in The Washington Times on Friday. Describing the report as “mind-boggling”, she said that if the reported “guest list” of terrorists was correct, it represented a “ghastly capitulation . . . living proof that it’s possible to kill and behead and hack and dismember and terrify your way to a peace parlay with the USA”.

She added: “Talking with terrorists is no longer taboo.”

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