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U.S. Considered Sunni Offer to “Clean Up” Iraq’s Pro-Iranian MilitiasBy Cliff Montgomery – Jan. 8th, 2007U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad negotiated with Iraqi Sunni militias for several weeks last year on an agreement which would have given the Sunni forces almost free reign to attack pro-Iranian Shiite militias, according to accounts given by Sunni resistance commanders to the London Sunday Times. The Times published the report in its Dec. 10, 2006 issue.The disclosure of U.S.-Sunni negotiations tallies with an account of those meetings first provided by a Sunni participant last May in an interview with the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper.In any case, the new accounts make it clear for the first time that the main objective of the talks was to explore possible U.S. support for a Sunni military force directed primarily against Shiites in Iraq.Iraq of course is made up not of one people, but primarily three: Sunnis, the minority religious group which held sway there for several years under Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athist PartyShiites, the majority religious group in Iraq; and the Kurds, a different ethnic group altogether.In the talks, the Sunnis assured the ambassador that their insurgents had sufficient troops and knowledge to deal successfully with the problem of Shiite militias in Baghdad, which Khalilzad had begun to recognize as a growing problem for the Bush Administration.”If he [Khalilzad] would just provide us with the weapons, we would clean up the city and regain control of Baghdad in 30 days,” one Sunni leader was quoted as saying.The negotiations between Khalilzad and Sunni insurgents were said by the Sunni leaders to have been conducted by former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, at Khalilzad’s request. Allawi apparently convinced Sunni resistance leaders that they could find common ground with the United States over Iranian influence in the country, which is exercised through Shiite political parties and militias.Throughout most of 2005, the Bush Administration ignored warnings from Allawi and other non-sectarian Iraqis about the rise of Shiite militias, which were taking revenge against Sunnis for their Ba’athist regime’s harsh treatment of Shiites over more than three decades, primarily under reigning Sunni Saddam Hussein.On Jan. 17, 2006, the top three Sunni commanders met with Khalilzad for the first time in Allawi’s villa in Amman, Jordan, according to their account to the Sunday Times. They recalled that they expressed concern at that meeting about Iran’s emergence as a growing regional power, suggesting that the similarity of interest with the United States on that point represented the framework within which the talks continued.A number of meetings were held over the next two months in Allawi’s home in Baghdad, according to their account, including some that stretched over two days. The earlier Sunni account of the talks published in Asharq al-Awsat reported that there were seven sets of meetings in all.One of the Sunni resistance leaders told the Sunday Times they demanded the United States agree to a “timetable for withdrawal”, but added it would be “linked to the timescale necessary to rebuild Iraq’s armed forces and security services.”Thus the Sunnis were in no hurry to see the U.S. forces leave–provided that they allowed a Sunni reintegration into the military.The Sunni leaders also demanded amnesty for insurgents, and a reversal of the “de-Ba’athification” policy that the majority Shiite parties strongly pushed. This of course would have allowed former Ba’athist members to regain a share of their previous power.Khalilzad expressed understanding for those demands in the talks, they recalled. The Sunni proposal put particular emphasis on the need to put non-sectarian officials in charge of the ministries of interior and defense, so that Sunnis may also occupy the upper echelons of a reconstituted army and police force.The Sunni leaders broke off the negotiations with Khalilzad in late April however, after he failed to respond to a “memorandum of understanding” they had given him nearly two months earlier. The Bush Administration resumed its support in April 2006 for fielding an almost exclusively Shiite and Kurdish army and paramilitary forces to suppress the Sunni resistance.The failure to reach any kind of deal with the Sunni organizations made it virtually impossible for the United States to curb the rising tide of sectarian killings of civilians, and the open civil war that has followed.But despite these repeated attempts by the Sunni militias to negotiate a settlement with the United States and the Iraqi government, the much-anticipated Iraq Study Group report openly dismisses the option of any agreement with the Sunnis to end the resistance based on a time schedule for withdrawal.
