Iraq Shi'ite leader wants insurgents wiped out
Fri Jun 24, 2005
By Mariam Karouny
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - One of Iraq's most powerful Shi'ite leaders, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, ruled out any dialogue on Friday with insurgents who, he said, had declared all out war on his community and "must be terminated."
Sunni Islamists and their Baathist allies no longer seemed focused on battling U.S. occupation or other political aims but on a sectarian fight to the death with Shi'ites, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) told Reuters at his fortified headquarters compound in Baghdad.
"The terrorist groups have revealed their purpose, which is creating sectarian strife, and stand in the way of the political process and building the new Iraq," Hakim said, a day after two waves of car bombs killed more than 30 people in mainly Shi'ite neighborhoods of the capital.
"What is new in these attacks is that they have started targeting the Shi'ites openly and clearly," he said.
"These terrorists must be terminated."
Last year there were a number of major attacks on civilians in the Shi'ite holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala and elsewhere.
Since the once-oppressed majority community took control of government two months ago, anti-Shi'ite rhetoric from al Qaeda's Iraqi wing and other Sunni groups has sharpened.
Hakim, who once led SCIRI's Badr Brigade militia against Saddam Hussein's forces from exile in Iran, has urged Shi'ites not to be provoked into civil war against Sunnis and said those opponents with political aims were welcome in negotiations.
The Badr movement, whose uniformed militiamen guard Hakim's office beneath a highway bridge on the banks of the Tigris, has denied sending hit squads to kill Sunni clerics.
NO DIALOGUE
Ministers in the coalition government, over which Hakim has great influence without having a cabinet post of his own, have said they are in indirect talks with nationalist militants who have been fighting American troops and whose aims appear partly to be to maintain a measure of power for the Sunni minority.
But Hakim, who survived a suicide bomb attack on his compound six months ago, made clear he saw most violence now as the work of Saddam's Sunni Baathist followers set on recovering power and groups like al Qaeda's Iraqi wing, led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Ansar al-Sunna.
Each of these claimed one of the latest coordinated car bomb attacks. Their stated aims are to create an Islamic Sunni Arab state and they routinely deride Shi'ites as heretics.
"Their target is not the occupation or anything else but the (Shi'ites) in Iraq," said the bearded Hakim, who dresses in the turban and dark robes of the Shi'ite clerical elite.
"There is no way to open a dialogue with these terrorists. They are not a political movement and their differences with us are not political," Hakim said, adding that he was happy to see an Iraqi constitution, currently being drafted, that reflected present, U.S.-sponsored, interim arrangements.
These give weight to Islamic law but do not foresee the sort of theocracy found in Shi'ite Iran's Islamic republic.
Hakim said that military force of the kind employed over the past month in Baghdad by his SCIRI ally, Interior Minister Bayan Jabor, was the only response to the attacks.
Operation Lightning, conducted by police in conjunction with U.S. and Iraqi troops, led to the detention of 1,200 suspects, though the week's bombings show it is some way from total success.
Hakim, who took over the movement in 2003 when his brother was killed by a bomb in Najaf, said he hoped, not least for personal reasons, that Saddam himself would soon be given a quick trial in Iraq followed by execution.
"There is no doubt Saddam deserves more than just execution," he said. "I am among those who are going to file a complaint for killing 64 members of my family.
"For these crimes alone ... he deserves 64 executions."
(Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald)
© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.