BAGHDAD, 18 August 2007 — Leaders of Iraq’s disenchanted Sunni Arab community yesterday slammed the new Shiite and Kurdish alliance formed to salvage Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s national unity government. The National Concord Front, the main Sunni Arab political bloc in the country’s 275-member Parliament, said the new tie-up between the two Shiite and two Kurdish parties was a “futile” exercise.
On Thursday, President Jalal Talabani and Maliki announced the forming of the alliance, which brought together Shiite Dawa Party and Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council and the Kurdish factions of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Kurdish Democratic Party (PDK).
The National Concord Front had boycotted talks, which led to the new bloc’s creation. “The leaders should not have announced the alliance before convincing all the effective political leaderships ... whose participation could have broken the stagnation (in the political process) and convinced the boycotting parties,” the Front said in a statement yesterday.
The Front has 44 members in the Parliament and has also withdrawn its ministers from Maliki’s Shiite-led government since Aug. 1, effectively paralyzing the political process in Iraq.
“The Front urges all parties to put pressure on the government to reactivate a real participation in the political process rather than have an arrangement where there is no authority to other parties (who are outside the alliance),” the Front said.
On Thursday, Talabani said the new alliance would “solve many problems in the present crisis and encourage others to join us.” Maliki also expressed his readiness to win Sunni support, a key demand from Washington, which wants the ousted elite re-engaged in the political process in a bid to sever its alleged support for insurgents.
Meanwhile, US troops clashed with suspected Sunni insurgents holed up in a mosque north of Baghdad and launched an air-to-ground Hellfire missile into the structure. One American soldier was killed in the fighting, the military said yesterday.
The soldier was killed and another was wounded when troops stationed at a nearby outpost came under heavy small-arms fire from the Honest Mohammed Mosque late Thursday in Tarmiyah as they targeted about six insurgents who were believed sheltered inside, according to the military.
The US forces then cordoned off the area and, unable to find the mosque’s preacher, sent the Sunni mosque’s groundskeeper into the building to persuade those inside to come out after they refused calls on loudspeakers, the military said.
“About 20 left the mosque and stated there was no one left in the mosque. This was not true,” said Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly, a military spokesman for northern Iraq. He said those 20 had been detained.
