Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
USA Today
January 24, 2007
Pg. 1
Critics ask whether prime minister will go after Shiite militias
By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY
BAGHDAD — They killed more than 60 members of his extended family. They murdered even more of his friends. They issued a death warrant for him.
For most of his life, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite Arab, says he has been persecuted and hunted by the Sunnis who dominated the government of Saddam Hussein.
Now, as Iraq's prime minister, al-Maliki must make peace between the two bitterly divided Muslim factions. President Bush has said that al-Maliki's ability to do that, and to shift responsibility from U.S. forces to Iraq's military and police, may determine the nation's fate.
"The prime minister has perhaps the hardest job in the world," says Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Bush's new security plan for Iraq includes committing 21,500 additional U.S. troops and hinges on whether al-Maliki is willing and able to crack down on the Shiite militias that U.S. commanders blame for much of the violence in the capital.
Al-Maliki's critics accuse him of protecting Shiite allies with blood on their hands. Since taking office last May, al-Maliki has blocked several attempts by U.S. and Iraqi troops to confront the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia group led by one of al-Maliki's key political supporters, the rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Al-Maliki's "personality and background make reconciliation impossible," says Saleh al-Mutlaq, a leading Sunni politician. "What he's trying to do now is buy time. The plan is to push Sunnis out of Baghdad."
In an interview Friday with USA TODAY, Bush said that he believes al-Maliki is "beginning to" go after all militias with equal vigor. Last week, al-Maliki's government announced the arrests of 400 Mahdi Army militants and a high-ranking al-Sadr aide whom the U.S. military accuses of being involved in death squads.
"There will not be any house or party headquarters or any office that has impunity from security operations," al-Maliki told reporters last week.
The prime minister "is walking a very tight tightrope," says Stephen Biddle, a fellow at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. "The central narrative of this conflict, almost from the beginning, has been Shiite vs. Sunni. If he sides too overtly with Sadr, he loses our support. If he falls off the tightrope (by) siding too closely with us, he loses credibility among the Shiites."
Al-Maliki, 56, is a quiet, intense workaholic whose life has been intimately shaped by the long Shiite struggle against foreign and Sunni oppression, say colleagues such as Sami Alaskary, a Shiite lawmaker and close aide. Al-Maliki declined to be interviewed for this story.
Originally from Hindiyah, a small river village near Karbala, al-Maliki spent his youth in Iraq's Shiite-dominated south. His grandfather, Mohammed Hassan Abul Mahasin, was a poet and rebel fighter against British occupation in the 1920s. Al-Maliki studied literature and poetry at the College of Usol al-Din in Baghdad and later based his master's thesis on his grandfather's poetry. He still recites the verses today.
In the late 1960s, al-Maliki joined Dawa, a Shiite group that opposed Saddam and sought to establish an Islamic republic in Iraq. Al-Maliki worked in the political bureau, organizing groups and meetings.
When Saddam's regime mounted a campaign of mass arrests, torture and murder against Dawa members in the 1970s, al-Maliki took refuge in the marshes of southern Iraq. There, he and other Dawa members dressed as locals, moved from village to village and evaded Saddam's agents while trying to help fighters from Iran join Iraqi resistance efforts, Alaskary says.
Like many other opposition members, al-Maliki took on a nom de guerre — Jawad — in an attempt to protect family members from reprisals. It didn't work. His family was routinely targeted as a way to get to him, says Hassan al-Sunneid, an Iraqi Shiite lawmaker and longtime friend.
"People from his tribe and many, many of his friends were killed," Alaskary says.
In 1979, after Saddam's regime issued a death warrant for him, al-Maliki fled to Iran. Despite Tehran's strong support for the cause of Iraqi Shiites, al-Maliki "never felt comfortable around the Iranians," Alaskary says. "He thought the Iranians were dishonest, that they were not true to their word. And their ambitions were not in Iraq's best interest."
After just two months in Iran, Dawa Party leaders sent al-Maliki to Syria. There, his job was to recruit exiled Iraqis into the party and run the Dawa newspaper Al-Mawkif. Even there, al-Maliki still largely kept to himself. "There is a psychological structure inside of him that makes him want to work only with Iraqis," Sunneid says.
Al-Maliki long mistrusted Americans as well, Alaskary says. During the 1991 Gulf War, Bush's father, then-president George H.W. Bush, encouraged Iraqis to rebel against Saddam but didn't send U.S. support. Thousands of Iraqis, many of them Shiites, were killed in retaliatory attacks by the regime.
Al-Maliki was in Syria at the time and played no role in the largely spontaneous Shiite uprising. Many of his friends and tribal members were killed. Other family members fled Iraq, Alaskary says.
That sense of betrayal still lingered on the eve of the U.S. invasion. Alaskary relates how, during a Dawa meeting in Tehran in 2002, al-Maliki asked: "Why will George Bush's son be any different?"
Al-Maliki's difficult relationship with the United States came to the forefront when he was unexpectedly thrust into the premiership last May. Al-Maliki was a compromise candidate who emerged after Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish parties disagreed on two previous candidates.
Al-Maliki was chosen because he had won the respect of many Sunni and Kurdish leaders during negotiations to form the constitution the previous year, said Mahmoud Othman, a leading Kurdish lawmaker. "We have a prime minister who never dreamed of becoming prime minister," says Mithal al-Alusi, an independent Sunni lawmaker who meets frequently with al-Maliki.
At first, al-Maliki bristled at what he saw as U.S. interference and grew frustrated at the lack of control he had over his fledgling Iraqi military, says Sadiq al-Rikabi, his political adviser. "He's not an easy man to ask him to do this and do that," he says. "Sometimes when you pressure him, he becomes tougher, rather than more flexible."
Sectarian violence took a turn for the worse, and the U.S. government pressed al-Maliki to take a tougher stance toward armed groups. However, in an October interview with USA TODAY, al-Maliki said he felt large street fights with the militias, particularly the Mahdi Army, would alienate Shiites from his government and embolden al-Sadr.
In October, al-Maliki ordered the release of a high-ranking al-Sadr associate arrested by U.S. troops for having links to death squads. A few weeks later, he demanded American troops remove a week-long cordon that had been set up around Sadr City, the volatile Shiite slum that is the stronghold of the Mahdi Army, as part of a search for a missing U.S. soldier.
According to a recent report by the United Nations, 34,452 Iraqi civilians lost their lives in 2006 as Sunnis and Shiites engaged in increasingly bloody revenge killings.
Then came the execution of Saddam on Dec. 30, which was marred by taunts and obscenities yelled by Shiites who took part in the hanging. Even Bush said it looked like "kind of a revenge killing."
The day before the execution, al-Maliki met with U.S. officials at his residence inside the Green Zone and signed stacks of papers to push the execution forward, even as his only son's wedding reception buzzed around him, says Basam Ridha, an adviser.
"The way the Saddam execution took place, the fact that sectarian violence has intensified the past several months, does not help in terms of establishing him as prime minister of all Iraqis," Khalilzad says.
Before becoming prime minister, al-Maliki served as deputy chairman of a committee that sought to remove former members of Saddam's Baath Party from government posts.
That has further deepened suspicions between him and Sunnis, says al-Mutlaq, the Sunni lawmaker.
Khalilzad acknowledges that al-Maliki has had trouble bridging divides between the two sects. "That has been a challenge for him," he says.
Many in the U.S. Congress have publicly wondered whether al-Maliki is the right man for the job.
Following a meeting with al-Maliki in Baghdad this month, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said that the prime minister had paid only "lip service" to easing sectarian tensions.
Also this month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that al-Maliki's government knew it was operating "on borrowed time." Al-Maliki reacted strongly, saying such statements bolster the morale of terrorists and lead them to believe they are winning. Rice later apologized.
In December, al-Maliki told The Wall Street Journal that he was exhausted and would rather not be prime minister. "I wish I could be done with it," he was quoted as saying.
Yet starting late last year, colleagues such as al-Alusi say they noticed a gradual change in al-Maliki's behavior and policies. He began speaking more favorably of American strategies toward Iraq.
The clearest sign of a broader shift came when al-Maliki agreed to allow U.S. troops into all parts of Baghdad, including Sadr City — a strategy he had previously bitterly resisted, al-Alusi says. "This is a huge development," he says.
January 24, 2007
Pg. 1
Critics ask whether prime minister will go after Shiite militias
By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY
BAGHDAD — They killed more than 60 members of his extended family. They murdered even more of his friends. They issued a death warrant for him.
For most of his life, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite Arab, says he has been persecuted and hunted by the Sunnis who dominated the government of Saddam Hussein.
Now, as Iraq's prime minister, al-Maliki must make peace between the two bitterly divided Muslim factions. President Bush has said that al-Maliki's ability to do that, and to shift responsibility from U.S. forces to Iraq's military and police, may determine the nation's fate.
"The prime minister has perhaps the hardest job in the world," says Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Bush's new security plan for Iraq includes committing 21,500 additional U.S. troops and hinges on whether al-Maliki is willing and able to crack down on the Shiite militias that U.S. commanders blame for much of the violence in the capital.
Al-Maliki's critics accuse him of protecting Shiite allies with blood on their hands. Since taking office last May, al-Maliki has blocked several attempts by U.S. and Iraqi troops to confront the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia group led by one of al-Maliki's key political supporters, the rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Al-Maliki's "personality and background make reconciliation impossible," says Saleh al-Mutlaq, a leading Sunni politician. "What he's trying to do now is buy time. The plan is to push Sunnis out of Baghdad."
In an interview Friday with USA TODAY, Bush said that he believes al-Maliki is "beginning to" go after all militias with equal vigor. Last week, al-Maliki's government announced the arrests of 400 Mahdi Army militants and a high-ranking al-Sadr aide whom the U.S. military accuses of being involved in death squads.
"There will not be any house or party headquarters or any office that has impunity from security operations," al-Maliki told reporters last week.
The prime minister "is walking a very tight tightrope," says Stephen Biddle, a fellow at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. "The central narrative of this conflict, almost from the beginning, has been Shiite vs. Sunni. If he sides too overtly with Sadr, he loses our support. If he falls off the tightrope (by) siding too closely with us, he loses credibility among the Shiites."
Al-Maliki, 56, is a quiet, intense workaholic whose life has been intimately shaped by the long Shiite struggle against foreign and Sunni oppression, say colleagues such as Sami Alaskary, a Shiite lawmaker and close aide. Al-Maliki declined to be interviewed for this story.
Originally from Hindiyah, a small river village near Karbala, al-Maliki spent his youth in Iraq's Shiite-dominated south. His grandfather, Mohammed Hassan Abul Mahasin, was a poet and rebel fighter against British occupation in the 1920s. Al-Maliki studied literature and poetry at the College of Usol al-Din in Baghdad and later based his master's thesis on his grandfather's poetry. He still recites the verses today.
In the late 1960s, al-Maliki joined Dawa, a Shiite group that opposed Saddam and sought to establish an Islamic republic in Iraq. Al-Maliki worked in the political bureau, organizing groups and meetings.
When Saddam's regime mounted a campaign of mass arrests, torture and murder against Dawa members in the 1970s, al-Maliki took refuge in the marshes of southern Iraq. There, he and other Dawa members dressed as locals, moved from village to village and evaded Saddam's agents while trying to help fighters from Iran join Iraqi resistance efforts, Alaskary says.
Like many other opposition members, al-Maliki took on a nom de guerre — Jawad — in an attempt to protect family members from reprisals. It didn't work. His family was routinely targeted as a way to get to him, says Hassan al-Sunneid, an Iraqi Shiite lawmaker and longtime friend.
"People from his tribe and many, many of his friends were killed," Alaskary says.
In 1979, after Saddam's regime issued a death warrant for him, al-Maliki fled to Iran. Despite Tehran's strong support for the cause of Iraqi Shiites, al-Maliki "never felt comfortable around the Iranians," Alaskary says. "He thought the Iranians were dishonest, that they were not true to their word. And their ambitions were not in Iraq's best interest."
After just two months in Iran, Dawa Party leaders sent al-Maliki to Syria. There, his job was to recruit exiled Iraqis into the party and run the Dawa newspaper Al-Mawkif. Even there, al-Maliki still largely kept to himself. "There is a psychological structure inside of him that makes him want to work only with Iraqis," Sunneid says.
Al-Maliki long mistrusted Americans as well, Alaskary says. During the 1991 Gulf War, Bush's father, then-president George H.W. Bush, encouraged Iraqis to rebel against Saddam but didn't send U.S. support. Thousands of Iraqis, many of them Shiites, were killed in retaliatory attacks by the regime.
Al-Maliki was in Syria at the time and played no role in the largely spontaneous Shiite uprising. Many of his friends and tribal members were killed. Other family members fled Iraq, Alaskary says.
That sense of betrayal still lingered on the eve of the U.S. invasion. Alaskary relates how, during a Dawa meeting in Tehran in 2002, al-Maliki asked: "Why will George Bush's son be any different?"
Al-Maliki's difficult relationship with the United States came to the forefront when he was unexpectedly thrust into the premiership last May. Al-Maliki was a compromise candidate who emerged after Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish parties disagreed on two previous candidates.
Al-Maliki was chosen because he had won the respect of many Sunni and Kurdish leaders during negotiations to form the constitution the previous year, said Mahmoud Othman, a leading Kurdish lawmaker. "We have a prime minister who never dreamed of becoming prime minister," says Mithal al-Alusi, an independent Sunni lawmaker who meets frequently with al-Maliki.
At first, al-Maliki bristled at what he saw as U.S. interference and grew frustrated at the lack of control he had over his fledgling Iraqi military, says Sadiq al-Rikabi, his political adviser. "He's not an easy man to ask him to do this and do that," he says. "Sometimes when you pressure him, he becomes tougher, rather than more flexible."
Sectarian violence took a turn for the worse, and the U.S. government pressed al-Maliki to take a tougher stance toward armed groups. However, in an October interview with USA TODAY, al-Maliki said he felt large street fights with the militias, particularly the Mahdi Army, would alienate Shiites from his government and embolden al-Sadr.
In October, al-Maliki ordered the release of a high-ranking al-Sadr associate arrested by U.S. troops for having links to death squads. A few weeks later, he demanded American troops remove a week-long cordon that had been set up around Sadr City, the volatile Shiite slum that is the stronghold of the Mahdi Army, as part of a search for a missing U.S. soldier.
According to a recent report by the United Nations, 34,452 Iraqi civilians lost their lives in 2006 as Sunnis and Shiites engaged in increasingly bloody revenge killings.
Then came the execution of Saddam on Dec. 30, which was marred by taunts and obscenities yelled by Shiites who took part in the hanging. Even Bush said it looked like "kind of a revenge killing."
The day before the execution, al-Maliki met with U.S. officials at his residence inside the Green Zone and signed stacks of papers to push the execution forward, even as his only son's wedding reception buzzed around him, says Basam Ridha, an adviser.
"The way the Saddam execution took place, the fact that sectarian violence has intensified the past several months, does not help in terms of establishing him as prime minister of all Iraqis," Khalilzad says.
Before becoming prime minister, al-Maliki served as deputy chairman of a committee that sought to remove former members of Saddam's Baath Party from government posts.
That has further deepened suspicions between him and Sunnis, says al-Mutlaq, the Sunni lawmaker.
Khalilzad acknowledges that al-Maliki has had trouble bridging divides between the two sects. "That has been a challenge for him," he says.
Many in the U.S. Congress have publicly wondered whether al-Maliki is the right man for the job.
Following a meeting with al-Maliki in Baghdad this month, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said that the prime minister had paid only "lip service" to easing sectarian tensions.
Also this month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that al-Maliki's government knew it was operating "on borrowed time." Al-Maliki reacted strongly, saying such statements bolster the morale of terrorists and lead them to believe they are winning. Rice later apologized.
In December, al-Maliki told The Wall Street Journal that he was exhausted and would rather not be prime minister. "I wish I could be done with it," he was quoted as saying.
Yet starting late last year, colleagues such as al-Alusi say they noticed a gradual change in al-Maliki's behavior and policies. He began speaking more favorably of American strategies toward Iraq.
The clearest sign of a broader shift came when al-Maliki agreed to allow U.S. troops into all parts of Baghdad, including Sadr City — a strategy he had previously bitterly resisted, al-Alusi says. "This is a huge development," he says.