In answer to a question on Fox News television about a London Sunday Times report that US officials met with insurgents in a bid of split off the homegrown insurgents from foreign fighters, Rumsfeld said:

"Sure, my goodness, yeah. The first thing you want to do is split people off and get some people to be supportive. The same thing's going on in Afghanistan," he said.

Rumsfeld added that "the meetings ... go on all the time," and said "I think the attention to this is overblown."

"I would not make a big deal out of it," he said.

According to the report in the London Sunday Times newspaper, US officials have held talks with Iraqi insurgents in the hope of negotiating an eventual breakthrough that might stem the violence in the country.

The meetings reportedly took place at a villa near Balad in the hills 40 miles (65 kilometres) north of Baghdad on two separate occasions in early June the weekly paper said, citing an Iraqi source said to have attended both events.

Four US officials - reportedly including senior military and intelligence officers, a civilian staffer from Congress and a representative of the US embassy in Baghdad - met at the villa with a former Iraqi minister, a senior tribal leaders, a small group of insurgent commanders.

Further talks were apparently planned, the report added.

In Baghdad, a US official said that contacts had been made with people close to Iraqi insurgents, but stressed that the talks were not actual negotiations.

"For some time now we've been talking to all sorts of Iraqis, some of whom are kind of dubious," the official said on condition of anonymity.

"There was never a clear 'start date' for these talks. We've always talked to people, and many of those people have some sort of link to insurgents."

The source added: "It's hard to gauge how much influence anyone has with insurgents, or to determine which insurgent group they're associated with for that matter.

The official made one thing clear: "there has been no change in US policy. We are not negotiating with insurgents."

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