BAGHDAD — Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is prepared to offer amnesty to the country's insurgents, even those who have attacked and killed U.S. forces, in a surprise bid to co-opt the resistance and demonstrate the appointed interim government's independence from the unpopular Americans.
Georges Sada, a spokesman for Mr. Allawi, explained that the Prime Minister wants to give insurgent fighters the opportunity to hand in their weapons and support the new government. He suggested not only that the government is prepared to offer amnesties but that attacks against U.S. troops over the past year were legitimate acts.
“If [an insurgent] was in opposition against the Americans, that will be justified because it was an occupation force,” Mr. Sada told Associated Press. “We will give them freedom.”
While the proposal has yet to be clearly defined, the amnesty would likely not apply to those who have carried out the most gruesome attacks, such as beheadings, or those who have attacked the interim government. The proposal seems intended for those who carried out attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces before last week's handover of sovereignty.
From that point on, according to United Nations Resolution 1546, U.S. and other multinational forces have been serving at the behest of the Iraqi government, so any violence since then would be considered an attack against Iraq itself.
Mr. Allawi knows full well that the presence of foreign troops is almost universally unpopular in Iraq; even the groups that suffered most under former president Saddam Hussein's regime are opposed to any continued U.S. presence. For instance, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's pre-eminent Shia religious leader, has urged his followers to give the interim government a chance, even while withholding his support from the Americans.
However, militant Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr issued a statement Sunday declaring Mr. Allawi's government illegitimate and promising to continue fighting. “There is no truce with the occupier and those who co-operate with it,” the statement said.
But if the Prime Minister hopes to succeed in taking the country to more representative elections in January, he must either co-opt the resistance or coerce it into submission. The damage being done is too great to ignore.
Although attention in the West has focused on the spectacular violence carried out by loyalists of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and those who have beheaded foreign captives, the most effective attacks of resistance have been lower-key. One senior U.S. military official said there are now 35 to 45 attacks a day against multinational forces, Iraqi troops and civilian targets.
Strikes against infrastructure have been especially damaging. Strikes on the weekend against oil pipelines near Basra and Fallujah will cut the country's oil exports at least 40 per cent until the lines are repaired. Assaults on the foreign technicians who help rebuild electric plants and other facilities are succeeding in driving many of them out of the country.
Mr. Allawi's controversial proposal is also an acknowledgment that most of the insurgents are actually Iraqis, not foreign militants, as asserted in the past.
“We must admit that much of the violence in this country is being committed by people born and raised in this country,” the senior U.S. military officer said. For every foreign national detained by U.S. forces, about 100 Iraqi nationals are detained, he added.
Still, the proposed amnesty is not likely to be greeted with enthusiasm by the largely Sunni resistance it is intended to address.
Abdel Jabar al-Kobeisi, editor of a pro-resistance newspaper, dismissed the prospect out of hand.
“It will do nothing,” he said. “The problem is not that people fear what will happen to them, as if they were common criminals; the problem is the occupation...Allawi is just trying to show that he is not exactly an American puppet. He will fail.”
As leading Sunni cleric Hareth al-Dhari told The Globe and Mail in an interview last week, those who formed this interim government “support the Americans for their own purposes.” They are the country's “second greatest enemy,” he said; the continued American occupation is the first.
Mr. Allawi's real goal in floating the amnesty may be more about winning public support than in hoping to end the resistance.
Juan Cole, a specialist on this region at the University of Michigan, has likened the present situation in Iraq to that in Iran during the 1970s. The goal of the insurgents is to stir popular demonstrations against the Americans and those seen as their puppets, he said. If Ayatollah Sistani and Mr. al-Dhari both call for the crowds to come out, hundreds of thousands of people could hit the streets.
The flashpoint issue may not need much of a trigger. For example, if January's elections are postponed for reasons of security, “we could see the big crowds start to come out,” Mr. Cole said — something Mr. Allawi is struggling to avoid.
With a report from Associated Press.
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