The worsening conflict in Iraq is increasing the odds of a regional war in the Middle East, outgoing UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said.
It is increasingly clear that soaring violence in Iraq affects not only that country but also threatens to "aggravate a range of underlying tensions in neighboring countries," Mr Annan, who leaves office on December 31st, said in his final report to the Security Council on the UN role in Iraq.
As a result, "the prospects of all-out civil war and even a regional conflict have become much more real", he said.
Kofi Annan
Mr Annan who will be succeeded by South Korean Ban Ki-Moon on January 1st.
His comments appeared to go beyond earlier expressions of concern about the crisis in Iraq. He said in a BBC interview aired this week that Iraq was in the grips of a civil war and many people were worse off now than under Saddam Hussein.
His latest remarks came days after the Iraq Study Group advised US president George Bush that his Iraq policy had failed and time was running out for setting a new course.
The group, which interviewed Mr Annan in the course of its work, urged Washington to include Iran and Syria in a new diplomatic drive to avoid a "slide toward chaos" in Iraq.
Kofi Annan
"It is the responsibility of the entire international community to get it right," Annan later told a Human Rights Watch forum in New York in response to an audience question.
"If we do not get it right in Iraq, if we are not able to hold Iraq together and Iraq were to break up, it will have an impact way beyond the region. If we are worried about oil prices at $60 or $70, it will go to $100 and $120 and everyone will pay a price," he said.
UN chief spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters the secretary-general had long stressed the importance of dealing with the Middle East as a whole rather than as isolated crises in Iraq, Lebanon and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Mr Annan said it was the Iraqi government's role to reach out to its neighbors for support as it sought to bring all disenfranchised groups into the political process and address terrorist, insurgent, sectarian and criminal violence.
"We talk of Iran and Syria. They have a vested interest in a peaceful Iraq," he told the Human Rights Watch forum. "If we can find a way of bringing everybody together to work with the Iraqis, we stand a better chance," he said.
His report suggested that Security Council permanent members Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States take a greater role in encouraging regional dialogue, and said the United Nations could help set up a mechanism for this.
Mr Annan has previously suggested an international conference on Iraq, which Baghdad's leaders have rejected.
The UN Secretary General's comments came after Iraqi and US officials disputed each other's accounts of an overnight air strike that killed up to 20 people in a new sign of friction over allegations of American troops killing civilians.
The US military said ground forces with air support killed 20 suspected al Qaeda militants, including two women, in an area where the Sunni Arab insurgency is strong.
However, police and local officials in Ishaqi, 90 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad, said the bodies of 17 civilians, including six women and five children, were found in the rubble of two homes.
"The Americans have done this before but they always deny it," Ishaqi Mayor Amer Alwan said. "I want the world to know what's happening here."
Complaints that unjustified killings by US troops are common have soured Iraqis' sentiment towards the US presence in Iraq and prompted Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki earlier this year to say he was losing patience over such reports.
The top US operational commander in the country said today the US could pull the bulk of its combat forces out of Iraq by early 2008 if Iraqis take significant steps toward reconciliation
"I think that's possible if in fact we have interim steps that are agreed upon with timelines that basically move us toward reconciliation," said Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, head of the US-led Multi-National Corps Iraq.
The United States has around 135,000 troops in Iraq.