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US Threatens to Cut Aid to Iraq if New Government Is Sectarian    [

    US Warns Iraq It Won't Support Sectarian Goals
    By Sabrina Tavernise and Robert F. Worth
    The New York Times

    Tuesday 21 February 2006

    Baghdad, Iraq - The American ambassador to Iraq issued an unusually strong warning on Monday about the need for Iraq's political factions to come together, hinting for the first time that the United States would not be willing to support crucial public institutions plagued by sectarian agendas.

    "The United States is investing billions of dollars" in Iraq's police and Army, said the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad. "We are not going to invest the resources of the American people to build forces run by people who are sectarian."

    Mr. Khalilzad spoke at a news conference on a day of fresh violence across Iraq. It was the bloodiest day in almost two months.

    He was addressing allegations that Shiite death squads operate within the Interior Ministry. Such reports have grown in recent months, with accounts of hundreds of Sunni men being rounded up by men in police uniforms and found dead days or weeks later.

    The deaths have infuriated the Sunni Arabs, whose radical fringe leads the insurgency here, and have sharpened their distrust of the Shiite-led government that swept into power last spring.

    Bombing attacks on Monday, including one inside a crowded commuter bus in Baghdad and another in a restaurant in northern Iraq, left at least 26 dead and more than 60 wounded. One American soldier was also killed.

    Iraqi political leaders are deep in negotiations over forming a government, more than two months after parliamentary elections.

    American officials have long argued that new cabinet ministers should place the interests of their country over those of their sects. But by linking American financing to a fair, nonpartisan army and police force, even if not intended as a direct threat, Mr. Khalilzad pressed the American position more forcefully and publicly than before.

    American officials are working to draw Sunni Arabs into the new government in an effort to build a stable society and begin bringing American troops home. Allaying Sunni concerns over overtly biased ministries is seen as an essential part of that effort.

    Monday's attacks, however, raised fresh fears of renewed violence.

    The worst of the violence began in Mosul, in northern Iraq. Shortly after 7 a.m., a suicide bomber walked into the Abu Ali Restaurant and detonated his payload, spraying shrapnel into diners, killing at least six of them and wounding six more, the police and local officials said.

    The attack was a clear strike against the police force: The restaurant is near a police station and is popular among officers, many of whom were eating breakfast.

    "I could not hear anything, and there was heavy smoke," said Said Tharwat, a 30-year-old injured in the attack.

    Several hours later in Baghdad, a man wearing a suicide vest boarded a bus in Kadimiya, a bustling Shiite neighborhood, and blew himself up, killing at least 12 Iraqis and wounding another 15, most of them Shiite commuters, a Ministry of Interior official said. One witness said that the fiery blast, which ignited the bus, scattered body parts and severely burned the wounded. A nearby traffic policeman was also killed.

    The wounded, with burns on their hands and faces, were evacuated to Kadimiya Hospital, where an official reported a higher death toll: 17.

    The violence came amid signs of serious disagreement over the shape of the government. The new parliament is required by law to meet for the first time on Saturday, and Mr. Khalilzad's remarks seemed calculated to put pressure on Iraqis to overcome their differences.

    He has sharply criticized Interior Ministry abuses in the past, echoing Sunni concerns about the ministry's failure to stop the killings. He amplified those concerns on Monday, urging the leaders to appoint interior and defense ministers who are "nonsectarian, broadly accepted and not tied to militias."

    If Iraq cannot control the sectarian agendas within its government, Mr. Khalilzad said, it "faces the risk of warlordism that Afghanistan went through for a period." Mr. Khalilzad was born in Afghanistan and served as an American envoy there before coming to Iraq last year.

    Tensions between Sunni Arabs and Shiite political groups are not the only obstacle to the kind of unity government that Mr. Khalilzad is advocating. and it is unlikely that a government will be formed soon, some Iraqi leaders said.

    The British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, also arrived Monday to discuss formation of the new government, Reuters reported.

    In more behind-the-scenes political negotiating, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari visited the leader of the Shiite majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, in Najaf.

    Mr. Jaafari, who was recently selected by the largest Shiite political bloc to remain prime minister in the next government, said Mr. Sistani had urged him to speed up the formation of the government "on the basis of high competence, integrity and transparency."

    Across Iraq on Monday, insurgents engineered at least eight attacks. In central Baghdad, a homemade bomb went off near a group of Shiite day-laborers around 8 a.m., injuring 20 of them, an Interior Ministry official said.

    North of Baghdad, in Nibai district, five truck drivers were killed and four wounded when their convoy supplying building materials to American forces came under attack, a provincial spokesman said. In Buhruz, another town north of Baghdad, an official from a hospital in Baquba was shot dead.

    In the Diyala Bridge area south of Baghdad, a car bomb exploded near an Iraqi official's convoy, killing 2 of his guards and wounding 11 civilians, the ministry official said.

    American forces faced fresh opposition in Karbala, a Shiite city in the south, when the governor of the province, Akeel al-Khazali, barred American troops from entering government buildings, according to the governor's press office. Mr. Khazali took issue with the Americans' bringing dogs into the building, but it was not clear if there was another, more serious disagreement behind the order.

    An American soldier was killed when his vehicle struck a home-made bomb just southeast of Karbala, the military said in a statement.

    Also on Monday, an Iraqi government official said the number of confirmed human deaths from the avian flu virus have been just two, fewer than previously thought.

    Omar al-Neami contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Mosul, Najaf and Karbala.

 

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    US Threatens to Cut Aid to Iraq if New Government Is Sectarian
    By Anne Penketh
    The Independent UK

    Tuesday 21 February 2006

    The US and Britain are pressuring Iraq's dominant Shia community to relinquish two key ministries in negotiations for a new government, as the country was hit by a wave of bombings that killed at least 24 people.

    The US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, warned yesterday that Washington might cut aid to the Iraqis if the new government included sectarian politicians, pointing out that the US had spent "billions" in building up the police and the army.

    "American taxpayers expect their money to be spent properly. We are not going to invest the resources of the American people into forces run by people who are sectarian," he said. He singled out the defence and interior ministries, saying they should be in the hands of people "who are non-sectarian, broadly acceptable and who are not tied to militias".

    Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, flew into Baghdad last night and was expected to deliver a similar message. A Foreign Office spokesman said that while it was up to Iraqis to decide on their government members, "we are keen to see these two departments in the hands of competent people, probably technocrats".

    Last week the Shia-dominated interior ministry announced an investigation into reports that it had been running death squads to wreak vengeance on Sunnis in reprisal for sectarian killings. There are fears that the killings by Shia commandos wearing police uniforms may encourage more Sunnis to join the armed insurgency.

    Yesterday, in Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed 12 people and injured 15 by setting off an explosive belt on a bus in a Shia district of the city, while a bomb attack killed four people near Liberation Square. In the Kurdish city of Mosul, a suicide attacker blew himself up in a restaurant packed with policemen eating breakfast, killing at least five people and wounding 21, including 10 policemen, officials said. Two more civilians died when a car bomb exploded in Madain, south-east of Baghdad. Eleven people were injured.

    Shia leaders say they have the right to control key offices in the government after winning 130 of the 275 seats in parliament in the elections in December. But the US and Britain say the secular, Kurdish and Sunni communities should have a "significant voice" in a future government, which will be in power for the next four years, and are pushing for a national unity government. It is anticipated that the discussions, which began in earnest this week, will take weeks, if not months, to produce a government.

    The influential young Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, for example, opposes the inclusion of the former prime minister Iyad Allawi, who, while in office, ordered the suppression of an uprising by fighters loyal to the Shia firebrand in the holy city of Najaf. But Mr Allawi, who presented a secular list in the elections, has been supported by the British.

    The Shia's choice for Prime Minister, the incumbent Ibrahim al-Jaafari, has come in for criticism because of his ineffectiveness in the outgoing government. He acknowledged yesterday that there had been "objections" to his candidacy, but challenged those opposed to him to state their reasons. He added that the formation of a new government faced "obstacles," but not insurmountable ones.

    Mr Straw is in Baghdad to help the process along, and will have talks with leaders who are struggling to set aside their sectarian bias to form a government.

    Britain's relations with Iraq have been complicated by the latest video apparently showing British troops abusing Iraqis during a riot in southern Iraq, which has prompted two councils in southern Iraq to end co-operation with British forces. Mr Straw is expected to discuss the fallout with officials and British military commanders, although British diplomats pointed out that the Iraqi police in the south were still co-operating with the British.

    The prospects for a withdrawal of British troops is also expected to be discussed by Mr Straw.

    Failure to establish a unity government that includes a strong role for Sunnis would fail to undermine the Sunni-dominated insurgency and could delay plans for a phased withdrawal of the 138,000 American troops and the 8,000 British soldiers in Iraq.