BAGHDAD, 20 August 2007 — Iraq’s fractious leaders yesterday agreed on the agenda for a political summit called by embattled Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki in a bid to salvage his crumbling unity government. The breakthrough came on the second day of preparatory talks involving the country’s most senior political leaders, Vice President Tariq Al-Hashemi said in a statement.
“We reached agreement on a number of issues,” the statement said. “The most important is the agenda for the summit and who will attend the meeting.” Talks involving Maliki, Kurdish President Jalal Talabani, Hashemi, who is a Sunni, Shiite Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi, and Masoud Barzani, president of the northern Kurdish region, began on Saturday and continued into yesterday, an official from Talabani’s office said.
No date has yet been set for the summit but the official said it would probably take place “in a couple of days.” He described the weekend talks as “preparatory” for the summit of political leaders across the spectrum, which was called by Maliki on Aug. 12 after a number of political blocs, including the main Sunni grouping, the National Concord Front, walked out of his unity Cabinet.
The boycotts have left Maliki, a Shiite, with just 23 ministers in his 40-member Cabinet, leading to delays in the passage of crucial laws aimed at rebuilding the country. In a bid to shore up his government, Maliki on Thursday announced the formation of an alliance grouping his Shiite Dawa party and Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council and the Kurdish factions of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Kurdish Democratic Party (PDK).
But the National Concord Front slammed the new tie-up as a “futile” exercise. Maliki is under growing pressure from Washington to end the infighting, concerned that it could torpedo efforts to reconcile the warring factions and undermine the work of 155,000 American troops trying to end the conflict.
The United States has pushed around 30,000 extra troops as part of a “surge” into Baghdad and surrounding flash point provinces in a bid to stamp out the sectarian violence which has killed thousands of people in the past 18 months.
But despite the extra troops, violence rages on and at least 12 people were killed yesterday when a barrage of mortars slammed into the east Baghdad neighborhood of Al-Obeidi, while another civilian died when a bomb hidden in a motorcycle exploded in the busy Al-Shorjah market close to the city center, security officials said.
US President George W. Bush on Saturday expressed concern at lack of reconciliation in the Iraqi government, which is still deeply divided along sectarian lines.
“Americans can be encouraged by the progress and reconciliation that are taking place at the local level,” Bush said in his weekly radio address.
However, he added, “political progress at the national level had not matched the pace of progress at the local level.” The top US military commander in the country, Gen. David Petraeus, and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker are scheduled to report to Congress by mid-September on whether efforts to halt sectarian violence and return Iraq to viable self-governance were bearing fruit.
A top US general said yesterday members of an elite Iranian force are crossing the border into southern Iraq to train Shiite militia fighters. The claim that Iranian trainers were working inside Iraq was issue by Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, whose command includes the volatile southern rim of Baghdad and districts to the south. He said his troops are tracking about 50 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps in their area.
“We know they’re here and we target them as well,” he said, citing intelligence reports as evidence of their presence. He declined to be more specific and said no Iranian forces have been arrested in his territory. “We’ve got about 50 of those,” he said, referring to the IRGC forces. “They go back and forth. There’s a porous border.”
The military has stepped up allegations against Tehran in recent weeks, saying it supplies militants with arms and training to attack US forces, but Lynch’s comments were the first detailed allegation that Iranians have been training fighters within Iraq’s borders. Iran denies the allegations and says it supports efforts to stop the violence.
