President Bush held talks at the White House yesterday with one of Iraq’s most powerful Shia leaders.

The meeting came ahead of tomorrow’s report from an independent commission that has been charting a possible new course for the country.

The meeting between Mr Bush and Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim is part of an effort by the US Administration to marginalise Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia cleric whose Mahdi Army militia is blamed for much of Iraq’s sectarian violence.

Mr al-Hakim is the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which runs its own 25,000-strong militia and heads the biggest bloc of MPs in the country’s parliament.

He and his party have close ties to Shia-dominated Iran, where he spent more than 20 years in exile before the fall of Saddam Hussein.

But Mr al-Hakim is regarded in Washington as someone with whom Mr Bush can at least do business, and is potentially an ally in reassuring Shias that the US is not siding with the minority Sunni population. Yesterday the Shia leader said: “We have asked for the American forces to stay in Iraq [to deal with terrorists].”

The White House knows that it is walking a tightrope in a country riven by sectarian violence, which many observers are now calling a civil war. Yesterday it emphasised that Mr Bush plans to be even-handed.

Tomorrow the independent Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker, the former Secretary of State, will publish its findings.

These are expected to call for a gradual withdrawal of US combat troops away from the frontline, more emphasis on creating political stability — instead of building democracy — within Iraq, and wider engagement with neighbouring countries including Iran and Syria.

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