(Adds news conference, Iraqi journalists killed)

By Ibon Villelabeitia

BAGHDAD, May 9 (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney pressed Iraq's Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Wednesday to pass power-sharing accords with minority Sunni Arabs as part of benchmarks Washington says are key to ending violence.

Cheney's unannounced visit, part of a Middle East tour, signals growing U.S. impatience at Maliki's failure to reach agreement with the Sunnis as American military commanders build up troops to secure Baghdad.

Cheney said discussions also centred on the crackdown in Baghdad, involving the deployment of 30,000 extra U.S. troops, which is seen as a last ditch effort to stave off civil war between the Shi'ites and once-dominant Sunnis.

"The meeting with the vice president (laid) the foundation for practical steps in order to support our efforts on both the security front as well as domestic political issues," Maliki told a joint news conference with Cheney.

Cheney said the talks also covered political and economic issues and added Washington would continue to support Maliki.

"Obviously we talked about the way ahead in terms of our mutual efforts to help build an Iraq that is safe and secure, is self-governing and free of the threats of the insurgency and al Qaeda," Cheney told reporters.

Underscoring the huge security challenges plaguing Iraq, a suicide truck bomber killed 14 people and wounded 87 in the relatively peaceful Kurdish region in the north, and three Iraqi journalists and their driver were dragged from their car, tortured and then shot dead near the northern city of Kirkuk.

U.S. President George W. Bush is under mounting pressure from Democrats to show concrete progress in the four-year war, in which more than 3,300 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed.

With U.S. troops dying daily, American officials have urged the Iraqi parliament to scrap a planned two-month summer recess.

During a visit to Baghdad last month, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said progress on a package of laws that include a bill dividing up Iraq's oil wealth would be an important factor in Washington's decision to maintain higher troop levels.

Earlier, Cheney met General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, who is expected to deliver an assessment of the "troop surge" in September.

Cheney arrived in Baghdad on the same day a USA Today/Gallup poll showed six out of 10 Americans support setting a timetable for pulling U.S. troops out, even though a clear majority predict civil war in Iraq if U.S. forces withdraw next year.

Last week, Bush vetoed a war-spending bill because it called for a pull-out of combat troops starting no later than October.

GAME TIME

A senior administration official who travelled with Cheney said the vice president's message boiled down to this:

"We've all got challenges together. We've got to pull together. We've got to get this work done. It's game time."

Cheney's visit comes at a sensitive time. Leaders from the Sunni Arab minority have threatened to quit Maliki's government because they say Sunni interests are being ignored.

Washington says a Sunni role in government is needed to bring Sunnis firmly into the political process and tame the Sunni Arab insurgency.

Ethnic Kurds, staunch U.S. allies, have also threatened to block the oil bill in parliament. The bill is another U.S. benchmark, along with legislation to roll back a ban on former members of Saddam Hussein's party from public office, a plan that has met deep Shi'ite opposition.

Unlike the almost daily bombings in the rest of the country, Wednesday's bomb attack, which police said was from a truck packed with 800 kg (1,700 lb) of explosives covered with kitchen cleaning products, was a rare event in the autonomous oil-producing Kurdish region.

Kareem Sinjari, minister of internal affairs in Kurdistan, said the blast near the Kurdish government's interior ministry in the capital Arbil killed 14 and wounded 87.

Police said the journalists had died after being intercepted by gunmen southwest of Kirkuk near the small town of Rashad.

Their bodies all bore deep slash marks across their faces and limbs, television pictures showed. Police said they believed the attack was prompted because the men were journalists.

Iraq is the most dangerous country in the world for reporters. The Vienna-based International Press Institute said in April that 46 journalists were killed last year in the country, of whom 44 were Iraqis.

AlertNet news is provided by