BAGHDAD – Iraq’s Shiite prime minister carried an appeal for unity to Saddam Hussein’s hometown Friday and told Sunni tribal chieftains that all Iraqis must join to crush al-Qaida in Iraq and extremist Shiite militias “to save our coming generations.”

Nouri al-Maliki’s bold sojourn into Tikrit – a city once pampered by Saddam, its favorite son – underlined the prime minister’s determination to save his paralyzed government from collapse and prevent further disillusionment in Washington as voices grow for a troop withdrawal plan.

The sharp alteration in the government’s political course – a willingness to travel to the belly of the Sunni insurgency and talk with former enemies – suggested a new flexibility from the hard-line religious Shiites who hold considerable influence over al-Maliki’s views.

It also pointed to an apparent shift in military and political attention to northern Iraq as extremists seek new bases after being driven from Baghdad and strongholds in central Iraq by U.S.-led offensives.

“There is more uniting us than dividing us,” al-Maliki told sheiks in Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad. “We do not want to allow al-Qaida and the militias to exist for our coming generations. Fighting terrorism gives us a way to unite.”

Al-Maliki’s turnaround has been startling, given accusations of a bias in favor of his Shiite sect.

He owed his premiership to the backing of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, nominal head of the Mahdi Army militia that has cleared entire mixed Baghdad neighborhoods of Sunni residents.

Throughout his first year in office, al-Maliki sought to protect the fighters from U.S. raids on their Sadr City stronghold in eastern Baghdad. He ended these safeguards this spring after al-Sadr loyalists quit the Cabinet because al-Maliki refused to set a timetable for an American withdrawal.

The prime minister reportedly engaged in heated arguments with the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, when the U.S. military began signing on former Sunni insurgents in the fight against al-Qaida in Anbar Province in Iraq’s west and Diyala province, north of the capital.

Now, al-Maliki is courting Sunni tribes in the north to join him.

And on Thursday, the prime minister signed a political manifesto, creating a new alliance with the Shiite Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and the country’s two main Kurdish political parties.

The Supreme Council has its own militia, the Badr Brigade, which is fighting al-Maliki’s erstwhile Mahdi Army clients across Baghdad and in the Shiite heartland to the south.

The dramatic new overtures illuminate al-Maliki’s fear of a quick U.S. troop withdrawal and his desperation to show progress on political reconciliation before Petraeus and American Ambassador Ryan Crocker report to Congress next month.

U.S. officials in Baghdad and Washington did not immediately signal support for the new political alliance, with a senior diplomat saying its lack of Sunni participation was a significant problem.

But President Jalal Talabani, one of the signers of the new coalition blueprint, appeared puzzled Friday by the lack of U.S. enthusiasm.

“I don’t hear any American welcome for the new alliance,” he said at a news conference, arguing that the U.S.-backed Iraqi constitution was partly to blame for the political paralysis. He apparently was referring to the complicated apportionment of key positions in government and parliament according to sectarian quotas.

Tarmiyah, a predominantly Sunni town 30 miles north of Baghdad, was the site of a coordinated attack involving a suicide car bombing and gunfire against a U.S. base in mid-February. Two soldiers were killed and 17 wounded in that ambush.

South of the capital, a Badr Brigade leader, Sheik Hamid al-Khudhari, was elected governor of Qadasiyah province, council member Ghanim Abid Dahash said. The previous governor was killed along with the provincial police chief in an ambush Aug. 11.

One other U.S. soldier was killed and two wounded Friday in a roadside bombing in eastern Baghdad. The deaths raised to at least 3,705 members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

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Associated Press writer Qassim Abdul-Zahra contributed to this report.

AP-ES-08-17-07 2033EDT