U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will attend Mideast democratization meeting scheduled for this week in Jordan, the State Department announced Monday.

Rice will attend the Forum for the Future conference at a Dead Sea resort on Thursday and Friday after participating in a meeting Wednesday in Amman between U.S. President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.

Rice is also to hold a series of meetings on the sidelines of the forum, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, without elaborating.

Bush and Rice left here early Monday for a visit to Estonia and to attend a NATO summit Tuesday and Wednesday in the Latvian capital, Riga, McCormack added.

The scheduled talks between Bush and Maliki is expected to focus on ways to halt the spiraling violence between majority Shiite Muslims and the minority Sunnis, who ruled the country under the ousted regime of Saddam Hussein.

The Forum for the Future is an annual conference held under the auspices of the U.S.-sponsored Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), launched in 2002 in a bid to promote education, private enterprise and democracy in the region.

Source: Xinhua