Saturday, Dec 31, 2005
Opinion - News Analysis
U.S. versus Iran in Iraq
Atul Aneja
Iran's influence over the SCIRI, a key constituent of the Iraqi Government, is setting up a confrontation with the United States.
AFTER FIRST courting Shia groups following their invasion of Iraq, the Americans have effected a major policy turnaround. Fearing that the Shia resurgence was helping to consolidate Iranian influence to unacceptable levels in Iraq, the Bush administration has been reaching out to rival Sunni groups in a big way. This shift became evident towards the third week of November, when the United States backed the Cairo conference on reconciliation in Iraq. Held under the aegis of the Arab League, the invitees included hardline Sunni religious groups as well as former Ba'athists having links with the Iraqi resistance movement.
The U.S. during the run-up to the December 15 elections, exhorted the Sunnis to participate in strength, in an apparent effort to limit Iranian influence in mainstream Iraqi politics.
Among the Shia groups, Iran is said to exercise maximum influence over the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). The SCIRI's leaders, including present head Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, spent several years in exile in Iran, when Saddam Hussein was the President of Iraq. There is enough material to suggest the Iranians have funded, armed, and trained the Badr corps, the SCIRI's armed wing.
The SCIRI became the centrepiece of the new Iraqi Government after the January 2005 elections. It has dominated the Interior Ministry, including the intelligence services, and its fighters form the core of the new Iraqi army. The group has been accused of spearheading street battles with Sunni resistance groups, who have, in turn also targeted the new Iraqi army regularly, raising the spectre of a civil war.
The SCIRI, a key constituent of the Shia United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), is now attempting to position Adel Abdul-Mehdi as Iraq's new Prime Minister, and thereby enhance its political profile. It has also sounded least interested in forging a political compromise to form a national unity government involving the Sunnis.
Rebuffing proposals for a compromise with the Sunnis as well as the secular Iraqiyah grouping of the former Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, the SCIRI, instead, has demonstrated its keenness to establish a political tie-up with ethnic Kurds, who appear to have done well in the parliamentary poll. At a press conference with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil on December 27, Mr. Hakim signalled he was disinclined to include the National Dialogue Council, led by Sunni leader Salih Mutlak, or Mr. Allawi's party in a possible grand national coalition.
Alarmed by the rise of Iranian influence, the U.S. has been making a deliberate effort to demonise the SCIRI. On November 13, the U.S. military command said in Baghdad that it had discovered a torture chamber, in the basement of the building where Sunni prisoners were being abused.
It alleged that the Interior Ministry, headed by Bayan Jabr Solagh of the SCIRI, ran the cell. Four days later, the U.S. Embassy issued a statement, which said that, "There must not be militia or sectarian control or direction of Iraqi Security Forces, facilities, or ministries."
Some analysts, however, have pointed out that the U.S. had long known about SCIRI hideouts where abuses have been alleged, but has gone public about them only after it decided to confront the pro-Iran group openly. For instance, the Christian Science Monitor has reported that the U.S. authorities had been made aware of the Interior Ministry's detention centres, where torture was suspected, even prior to June 2005.
Targeting the SCIRI after the elections, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, told a press conference on December 19 that, "You can't have someone who is regarded as sectarian as Minister of the Interior."
The U.S. discomfort with pro-Iranian Shia groups has risen substantially after what it considered was "bad news," began to flow in torrents in recent weeks. Contrary to its expectations that the Sunnis and Mr. Allawi's group would do well, it is the Shia alliance that seems to have emerged as the dominant political force in Iraq following the December 15 elections. The effort to malign the polls as partially rigged has also boomeranged.
Copyright © 2005, The Hindu.