First the Shia were the ones resisting the American sponsored caucuses. Now the Sunnis are opposed as well. Oops - time for Plan D (Plans A and B have already been discarded, and Plan C is now in trouble.)
Feeling Besieged, Iraq's Sunnis Unite
Iraq's minority Sunni Muslims, who enjoyed a favored place under former president Saddam Hussein and now complain of discrimination, have formed a national council to press their interests with U.S. occupation forces and counter the threat of domination by rival Shiite Muslims.
Founders of the shura, or consultative, council said its establishment a week ago is unprecedented in the history of Iraq's Sunnis, reflecting their dramatic reversal of fortune following Hussein's ouster. By forming a body representing a cross-section of Sunnis, they said, they hope to offer the U.S. government a central interlocutor for discussing their future and that of Iraq.
So far, the Sunnis have mostly been sources of trouble for U.S. forces. Attacks against U.S. and allied forces have been centered in the largely Sunni region north and west of Baghdad known as the Sunni Triangle, and U.S. commanders have described the insurgency as an exclusively Sunni endeavor.
Dan Senor, a spokesman for the U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said the U.S.-led occupation authority was still learning about the Sunni body but would welcome a constructive dialogue. "If the shura council seeks to engage in a cooperative relationship with shared principles of promoting democracy and nonviolence, then the [occupation authority] will be ready to respond," Senor said.
But the formation of the Sunni council could also complicate U.S. plans for transition to Iraqi sovereignty by July 1, because the Sunnis would be in a stronger position to resist these efforts. The council, for instance, is demanding that the next Iraqi government be selected by direct election rather than through local caucuses, as U.S. officials prefer.
The shura council was set up during a conference at Baghdad's largest mosque, Umm al Qurra, a structure known before the U.S. invasion as the Mother of All Battles Mosque. Though the initiative for a national council emerged shortly after Baghdad's fall in April, officials involved in its development said the project accelerated in recent months as fears mounted that the Sunnis' leadership role in Iraq was being eclipsed by the majority Shiites, especially on the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
"After the war, there was a large political and social vacuum," said Mohammed Ahmed Rashid, an activist with the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which is involved in forming the council. "We think the American military mistakenly believed that the Shiites constituted a large majority in Iraq, and for that reason gave the Shiites a bigger slice of control on the Governing Council and in the political life of the country."
Hussein's capture last month also removed the focus of many Sunnis' political aspirations. It also eliminated the shadow the former president cast over many Sunni areas even after his ouster.
The shura council includes equal representation from each of the three main currents within the Sunni Muslim community: the politically oriented Muslim Brotherhood, the religious puritans of the Salafi movement and the adherents of the mystical Sufi tradition. Within each group, half the seats are allocated for ethnic Arabs and half are divided between ethnic Kurds and Turkmen. Dozens of other council members are drawn from professionals, intellectuals, tribal leaders and other civic groups.
The council does not plan to exclude former members of Hussein's government unless they were involved in criminal activities, Rashid said. "Those who had leadership positions in the Baath Party will not have leading positions in our organization. But we can cooperate with them and make use of their efforts," he said.
Activists involved in the insurgency against U.S. occupation will also be eligible to join the council, though the council's position on the uprising remains unclear, Rashid said. He explained that Iraqis retained the right to resist the occupation, adding that the council supported all peaceful means to oppose it. He said council members have reserved judgment on whether to back armed resistance.
The council's primary goal, he said, is to play a role in drafting an Iraqi constitution and forming a new government, including the election of a president. By unifying their community, Sunni leaders would have more leverage with occupation officials and the Governing Council.
"We established the council to demand that the rights of Sunnis be equal to those of others, especially the Shiites, and to limit the outside interference in the political life of Iraq," Rashid said.
Despite sharp differences over other issues, Sunnis involved in the shura council said they agreed with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, about his demand that a new transitional government be chosen through direct elections, which would place power in the hands of the Shiites, according to many political observers. But Rashid said elections, monitored by international observers, would actually demonstrate that the U.S. administration had underestimated the Sunni population.
U.S. officials say about one-fifth of Iraq's 24.7 million inhabitants are Sunni Arabs and three-fifths are Shiite Arabs. Sunni activists, however, claim the total Sunni population, including ethnic Kurds and Turkmen, is equivalent to that of the Shiites.
Bremer has been negotiating with Sistani for weeks over a plan that could accommodate the cleric's call for elections while retaining a role for provincial caucuses. At the same time, in the absence of a recognized Sunni authority, U.S. officials have been trying to develop a strategy to win over local tribal leaders in predominantly Sunni areas, aiming to allay their fears that the transition plan is a recipe for Shiite domination.
U.S. efforts to engage Sunnis more broadly have been hamstrung by the absence of major political parties or religious authorities that could speak for the community. By contrast, Iraqi Shiites have long had political parties and religious scholars representing most of their adherents.
Shura council members said they were open to direct talks with Bremer, adding that they had already begun informal contacts with the provisional administration.
In pressing for a transitional government, however, shura council leaders said they did not intend to work through the ruling structure in Baghdad headed by the Governing Council, which they dismissed as a tool of U.S. occupation that substantially underrepresents Sunnis. The 25-member council includes five Sunni Arabs, whose credibility among their coreligionists is questioned by many.
If direct talks are to proceed between the shura council and the occupation authority, the two sides must overcome mutual suspicion. Last week, U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces arrested several shura council members during a raid on a major Baghdad mosque, according to Fakhri Kaisy, a council spokesman. He accused the U.S. military of seeking to thwart Sunni efforts to organize politically. "It looks as if the American people want to erase the Sunni people from the history of Iraq," he said.
U.S. military officials said the operation was based on intelligence that the mosque was a center of resistance activity, adding that they discovered a cache of weapons, ammunition and explosives. U.S. officials said they did not know whether commanders were aware that shura council members were meeting in the mosque at the time.
While keeping one eye on the United States, the shura council is also looking to limit the influence of the Shiites and their backers in neighboring Iran, which is largely Shiite. Rashid said the shura council would press for legal restrictions on the immigration of Shiites from Iran who he said had been passing themselves off as Iraqi citizens. Another priority would be to prevent Iraq from joining a security alliance with either Iran or Turkey. Rashid said Iraq must remain in the Arab League, which consists overwhelmingly of countries governed by Sunnis.
Rashid said the council was also determined to resist an agreement between U.S. and Iraqi officials to introduce a federal system that would grant enhanced autonomy to the Kurdish north, calling such an act the first step toward partition of Iraq.
Underpinning the formation of the shura council is a belated realization among many Sunnis that developments have turned against them and that, unlike the Shiites, they were not prepared for the overthrow of the Hussein government.
Over the centuries, Shiites have traditionally looked to their top clerics for leadership, creating a widely recognized authority apart from the state. But many Sunnis saw Hussein's ruling Baath Party, which filled its upper ranks with Sunnis, as their primary political organization. That fit with the traditional Sunni view that even an unjust leader, as long as he is Muslim, deserves obedience because the alternative could be anarchy, according to Harith Dhari, a Sunni cleric.
"A political vacuum in the eyes of Sunnis is more despicable than an unjust ruler. The state we are in right now confirms the truth of that," said Dhari, who played a central role in establishing the shura council. "Before, we had a government that gave us law and order. After the American occupation, each group in Iraq is pursuing its own interest and trying to secure its own welfare."
The Sunnis have paid a high price, he said. U.S. forces, acting on what Dhari called misinformation supplied by the Sunnis' rivals, have been raiding Sunni homes in pursuit of insurgents and filling prisons with Sunni suspects. At the same time, he said, militias affiliated with Shiite political parties have assassinated scores of respected Sunnis. Shiite party leaders have denied their followers played any role in such killings.
"We never needed a body like the shura council before. But now we need it to look after our political, social and religious affairs," Dhari said.
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