Saudi Arabia held the U.S. responsible for the current violent situation in Iraq and insists its opposition to military solution to the issue of the war-torn country, a Saudi Arabia diplomat told Xinhua here on Wednesday.

"The U.S. should hold 100 percent responsibility for what is going on in Iraq, our policy is still the same as before, that is for political solution, against military solution," said Mutlaq Saud al-Mutiri, press attache of the Saudi Arabian embassy in Cairo.

On the U.S. plan to send 35,000 extra troops to Iraq later this year, Mutiri said the U.S. decision was meant to show that extra troops are needed to prove its success in Iraq, terming the issue of troops withdrawal from Iraq as a pure American affair.

"We must admit there is an ethnic war in Iraq now, and the violence there will not be reduced until the end of this ethnic war," he asserted, calling for more focus on the reality of the state itself, rather than the division between the religion groups of Sunnis and Shiites.

On the international conferences on Iraq held in Egypt's Red Sea resort Sharm el-Sheikh, Mutiri said that the meetings aimed to probe ways how to reduce the violence in Iraq, and the bilateral meetings and contacts between the U.S. and Syria and Iran indicated the U.S. willingness to give these two countries a role in Iraq.

However, only the Iraqi government and Iraqi people can solve the problem in their own country, he added.

At the opening session of an Arab summit in Riyadh late March, Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz condemned the military occupation of Iraq "illegitimate".

On Wednesday, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney met with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and other Iraqi officials on Wednesday during his surprise visit to Baghdad, the first stop of his Mideast tour which will also take him to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

Cheney's Mideast tour aims at consolidating the results of Sharm el-Sheikh conferences and would seek to rally regional support for the Iraqi government and people, according to U.S. officials.

Source: Xinhua