Top US commander Admiral Mike Mullen made an unannounced trip to Iraq on Monday, visiting the ethnically divided northern oil city of Kirkuk for the second time in a year.
Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, met representatives of the city's divided communities, provincial officials and senior Iraqi police commanders in the provincial government buildings.
The US commander said he had "come to listen to our problems but that neither he nor the United States want to impose a solution for Kirkuk," said Mohammed Kamal, a member of the former rebel Kurdistan Democratic Party who took part in the meeting.
"The answers must come from Iraqis," Mullen added, according to Kamal.
Provincial councillor Ahmed al-Askari said Mullen had insisted that Kirkuk was an "internal Iraqi matter that has to be resolved by all of the city's communities."
He added: "The United States stands ready to provide every assistance to bolster security," Askari added.
Iraq's Kurds have long laid claim to Kirkuk, the hub of Iraq's northern oil fields, but their demands for it to be made the capital of their autonomous region in the north have run into persistent opposition from the province's Arab and Turkmen communities.
The Kurds counter that much of the province's Arab population was resettled as part of a deliberate policy by Saddam Hussein's regime to alter its historical Kurdish majority.
The communal tensions prevented the holding of provincial elections in Kirkuk on January 31, when all but the three Kurdish provinces among Iraq's other 17 provinces voted for new councils.
