Shahristani to Be Named Iraq Premier, U.S. Sources Say
Tuesday, May 25, 2004 8:27 p.m. ET
By Carol Giacomo and Saul Hudson WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United Nations is expected to pick Hussain Shahristani, a Shi'ite Muslim nuclear scientist who spent 11 years in Abu Ghraib prison under Saddam Hussein, as premier of a new interim Iraqi government, U.S. sources said on Tuesday.
A State Department official said Shahristani was one of three finalists being considered for the key post but other sources said Shahristani was expected to head the new caretaker government when the United States hands over power on July 1. Asked if U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi had made his choices, one source with close ties to the Bush administration told Reuters: "Shahristani for prime minister." The State Department official said: "He is one of about three finalists who was being considered for prime minister. I do not know whether he was chosen and actually asked." "It's pretty obvious it has to be a Shi'ite. It also has to be someone who is not seen to be beholden any particular faction or party and yet not be so much of a technocrat that he has no standing with the parties," he said. Shahristani fit that profile, he added. Another U.S. source said he expected Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni Muslim and one-time Iraqi foreign minister, to be president. Vice presidential choices are expected to be Ibrahim Jaafari, a medical doctor who is spokesman of the Dawa Party, and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, although it is unclear if Talabani would take the job, the source said. BRAHIMI CHOICES The slate of leaders to head the interim government that will administer Iraq until elections planned for January 2005 is being put together by Brahimi, special envoy of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, with the close assistance of Robert Blackwill, President Bush's special adviser on Iraq.
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Shahristani was tortured and imprisoned by Saddam after refusing to work on Iraq's nuclear weapons program. In a February 2003 interview on CNN, Shahristani said the Iraqi president was hiding weapons of mass destruction underneath the ground in tunnels. Bush cited Saddam's weapons of mass destruction as a prime reason for the Iraq war but none have been found. In a January 2003 interview with Canadian Television, Shahristani criticized Bush's father for abandoning Iraq's Shi'ite population after the 1991 Gulf War when he urged them to rise up and overthrow Saddam. FIRM VIEWS "If anybody expects these people to forget all these sufferings and welcome any invading force with open arms to come and loot their oil, I think they are terribly mistaken," Shahristani said in that interview. More recently, in a February 2004 article in the Wall Street Journal, he sided with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's leading Shi'ite cleric, on the issue of elections and questioned whether Washington "understands the Iraqi reality."
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