BAGHDAD, 26 July 2006 — Baghdad’s descent into chaos claimed more victims yesterday as Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki arrived in Washington under pressure to restore order and pave the way for the departure of US forces.
As gunshots and bomb blasts echoed around the capital, the Iraqi leader went into talks with US President George W. Bush knowing that both the Americans and his own supporters are disappointed with his handling of the situation.
In a further sign of a loss of confidence in the Iraqi government’s tactics, an influential Shiite leader called for residents to be allowed to form self-defense units to protect themselves against sectarian attack.
As a new day revealed another crop of tortured corpses, Maliki met Bush at the White House, where officials had earlier expressed “disappointment” with the failure of a six-week-old operation to restore order in Baghdad.
Meanwhile, the leader of the largest party in Maliki’s ruling coalition said people in Baghdad should arm themselves as protection from roving death squads. Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, a leading Shiite and the head of the powerful Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, said that “people’s committees” should be formed to create local protection units.
“In Shiite neighborhoods, they would be protected by young Shiites, because they live there. And the same thing for Sunni neighborhoods: they will be protected by young Sunnis,” he said, in an interview with the Washington Post.
Meanwhile, defense lawyers for hunger-striking former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said yesterday they were “profoundly worried” about his health and vowed to pursue their boycott of the trial. Saddam and three of his former aides went on hunger strike July 7, according to their US jailers, in protest at their treatment and the way their trial on charges of crimes against humanity was being run.
The defense team, based in neighboring Jordan, said in a statement they were “worried for the health of president Saddam Hussein and his comrades in the light of contradictory news about his state of health.”
Over the weekend, prosecutors said that 68-year-old Saddam’s hunger strike was harming his health and had led to him being given hospital treatment, but on Monday a spokesman for Saddam’s US jailers said his life was not in danger.
