About time.Iraq premier-designate has his work cut out for him
Iraqi Prime Minister-designate Haider Abadi, left, with fellow lawmakers Salim Jabouri and Aram Sheik Mohammed in July. In parliament, Abadi earned a reputation for pragmatism and support of private enterprise. (Ali Abbas / European Pressphoto Agency)
By Shashank Bengali, Brian Bennett contact the reporters
SHARELINES * Iraq's prime minister-designate is seen as more moderate, but also a cautious party stalwart
* U.S. looks to Iraq's premier-designate, Haider Abadi, to form a more inclusive government
* Even if he is able to form a ruling coalition, Iraq's Haider Abadi may still struggle to win Sunni support
August 14, 2014, 4am Reporting from Washington
Early in 2007, with Iraq embroiled in sectarian violence, American diplomats in Baghdad tried to persuade a key Shiite Muslim lawmaker to support the easing of a ban on the Sunni Arab-dominated Baath Party.
At a meeting at the U.S. Embassy, the lawmaker, Haider Abadi, was noncommittal, saying that changes to the laws forbidding political activity by Saddam Hussein's old party would be a tough sell with Shiites. But Abadi, a British-educated engineer, also expressed hope that the rival sects would find common ground in opposition to Sunni-led Al Qaeda extremists.
Sunni lawmakers "are looking for allies," Abadi said, according to a State Department dispatch obtained by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. "We are ready."
That encounter was quintessential Abadi, according to former U.S. officials and analysts who have followed the career of the man who was tapped this week to serve as Iraq's next prime minister.
Interactive Islamic State in Iraq and Syria Raoul Rañoa
Seen as less ideological and more moderate than many leading Shiite politicians — including the man he would replace, divisive two-term Prime Minister Nouri Maliki — he is at the same time a cautious party man who has rarely broken with the Shiite mainstream on crucial issues such as "de-Baathification" and power sharing.
With the United States now seeking to reverse the momentum of Islamic State, an Al Qaeda breakaway group that has swept across northern and western Iraq, Obama administration officials hope that Abadi will make good on previous overtures toward minority Sunni Arabs and Kurds and form a more inclusive, moderate government. As a former businessman and chairman of the parliament's finance committee, he earned a reputation for pragmatism and support of private enterprise.
"Abadi is known in Iraq as someone who can reach across the party aisle and has earned respect as a skilled negotiator," said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity in discussing internal assessments.
Yet even if Abadi is able to form a ruling coalition, he may still struggle to win the crucial support of Sunnis, whose disaffection with Maliki's sectarian policies has fueled the rise of the Sunni extremists. Abadi secured the prime ministerial nomination Monday with the backing of a Shiite coalition that includes supporters of former Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani, who has angered Sunni Arabs and Kurds by insisting that all Iraqi oil be controlled by the Shiite-led central government, and the radical cleric Muqtada Sadr.
"Neither he nor his coalition are auspicious in terms of expecting a significant change," said Kirk Sowell, a political analyst who edits the Inside Iraqi Politics newsletter and is based in Jordan.
"There were people around Maliki who were flamethrowers; [Abadi is] not a flamethrower. But at the same time, Abadi has never been known as someone who's pushing reforms."
Getting water Ahmad Rubaye / AFP/Getty Images
[it says 70 images, ooi, can anyone see more than the first?]
On Wednesday, Maliki said in a weekly televised address that he would not give up power until Iraq's high court rules on his claim to office, but he pledged not to use force to keep his post. With support for Maliki evaporating, Abadi is moving ahead with forming a new Cabinet under a constitutionally mandated 30-day deadline.
Like Maliki, the Baghdad-born Abadi is a longtime member of the Islamic Dawa Party, a Shiite opposition group banned during Hussein's long rule. But the two men took different paths as exiles pushing for the dictator's overthrow.
In the 1980s, while Maliki took part in clandestine efforts from Syria and Iran to destabilize the Baathist-led government, Abadi lived in Britain, where he earned a doctorate in engineering from the University of Manchester. According to a biography on his Facebook page, two of his brothers were executed in Iraq in 1982 for being Dawa members.
Abadi remained with his family in Britain and ran a small company that, among other things, helped to modernize London's transportation system. He returned to Baghdad in 2003 after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Hussein and became minister of communications in the Coalition Provisional Authority under American civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III. Abadi was elected to Iraq's re-formed parliament in 2006.
Balding, with a neatly trimmed gray beard, Abadi is better known to Iraqis than Maliki was when U.S. officials plucked the latter from obscurity and backed him for the premiership. American diplomats who have since worked behind the scenes for Maliki's ouster believe Abadi may be more open-minded toward Washington and other Western allies, officials said.
--- "Abadi is known in Iraq as someone who can reach across the party aisle and has earned respect as a skilled negotiator." - U.S. official, referring to Iraqi Prime Minister-designate Haider Abadi ---
Before the Obama administration launched airstrikes last week against Islamic State militants in northern Iraq, Abadi was a vocal proponent of U.S. military intervention. He told the Huffington Post in June that renewed U.S. involvement would mean the Iraqi government would not have to rely solely on military support from Iran.
"There are some reasons to think he is not beholden to or enamored with Iran as Maliki has been," said David Pollock, a Middle East expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In the same interview, Abadi acknowledged that Iraqi security forces had committed "excesses" that should be investigated, without elaborating. Under Maliki, the security forces were accused of abducting and torturing untold numbers of civilians, most of them Sunnis, who were being held without charges.
But Abadi rejected allegations that Maliki persecuted or marginalized Sunnis. He has also drawn the ire of Kurds for saying their demands for a greater share of oil revenue from the semiautonomous northern Kurdish region could cause Iraq's "disintegration."
Experts say that as prime minister, Abadi would have to take swift steps to reform Iraq's security establishment and share sufficient power with Sunni Arabs and Kurds to build support for fighting the Islamist militants.
"He's going to face every single challenge that Maliki faced," said Hayder al-Khoei, an Iraq expert at Chatham House, a British-based think tank. "That has nothing to do with personalities. There are systematic failures having to do with governance, nepotism, corruption that are not going to go away overnight."
To the extent that personalities matter, the difference is stark. In contrast to Maliki's hangdog demeanor, Abadi is known for being pleasant, comfortable with reporters and dryly funny at times, even at the expense of American interlocutors.
In September 2007, after then-Ambassador Ryan Crocker and coalition commander Gen. David Petraeus delivered a mostly rosy assessment of Iraq to a congressional panel in Washington, U.S. officials asked Abadi in a meeting whether he had seen the testimony.
According to a summary of the meeting obtained by WikiLeaks, "Abadi said with a wry grin that the tone was so upbeat, 'even Maliki himself could not have written a better report.'"
Bengali reported from Mumbai, India, and Bennett from Washington.
Sunni tribal leaders offer to battle Islamic State if Baghdad makes concessions
By Mitchell Prothero and Adam Ashton
McClatchy Foreign StaffAugust 15, 2014 Updated 4 hours ago
Volunteers in the newly formed "Abbas Brigades" participate in a parade near the Imam Hussein shrine in the southern holy Shiite city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad, Iraq, Aug 14, 2014. (AP Photo/Ahmed al-Husseini)
AHMED AL-HUSSEINI — AP
IRBIL, Iraq — Leaders of Iraq’s Sunni Muslim tribes threatened Friday to rebel against the Islamic State, the first indication that a change of government in Baghdad might allow a new prime minister to rally the country’s divided ethnic and religious groups against the Islamist extremists.
But the Sunni offer to battle the militants came with strings _ possible autonomy and the withdrawal of Iraqi military forces from Sunni areas _ that would be difficult for a Shiite-led government to grant, and Shiite politicians in Baghdad showed little enthusiasm. One, Dhiaa al Asadi, a member of Parliament loyal to cleric Moqtada al Sadr, called the Sunni proposal “very exaggerated and unrealistic.”
U.S. officials have predicted since the Islamic State began its sweep through much of central, western and northern Iraq, often with the collaboration of Sunni tribes, that a more conciliatory government in Baghdad, coupled with harsh rule imposed by the Islamists, would move disaffected Sunnis to rebel. That’s one reason the U.S. pushed so hard for Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to resign in favor of a replacement who would be more disposed to offer concessions to Sunnis and Kurds.
That happened Thursday, with Maliki endorsing a fellow member of the Dawa party, Haider al Abadi, to succeed him.
Then Friday came the first suggestion that the U.S. theory might prove accurate: an impromptu televised speech by one of the leading Sunni tribal leaders, Ali Hatem, the head of the Dulaim tribe who has sought refuge in Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish zone, from an arrest warrant issued by the Baghdad government charging him with treason.
Hatem, whose Dulaim clan is the largest in Anbar province, said tens of thousands of Sunni tribesmen and other anti-government groups now supporting the Islamic State would change their loyalties if the new government in Baghdad offered something in return. He said that the Islamic State includes thousands of non-Iraqis who could easily be defeated by Iraq’s much larger complex of Sunni tribes.
All the new government of Prime Minister-designate Abadi must do, Hatem said, is end Iraqi army and Shiite militia activities in Sunni areas, limit government and American airstrikes to Islamic State targets only, and hold a referendum that would grant Sunnis autonomy from the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.
“We will fight them once you return our rights and remove the Maliki militias,” Hatem said.
“Do not worry about Daash,” he said, using a derogatory Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “We are prepared to cooperate and address this issue and you will see the results on the ground. Daash formed because of the sectarian policies of Nouri al Maliki, and it will be no problem for the tribes of Iraq to remove them if we are supported.”
A second offer of rebellion came from Anbar province in Iraq’s west, where 25 major tribes announced to the French Agence France-Presse news service that they would take up arms against the Islamic State after the group “spilled the blood” of tribal members in a series of previously unreported clashes.
“This popular revolution was agreed on with all the tribes that want to fight ISIS, which spilled our blood,” the agency quoted Sheikh Abdel-Jabbar Abu Risha as saying.
The Abu Risha tribe was a key participant in the American-backed Awakening Councils, a successful attempt by the tribes to push their onetime allies in al Qaida in Iraq out of Anbar in 2007. The Islamic State, the successor to al Qaida in Iraq, took control of most of the province in December.
Other media reports said that clashes northwest of the Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi between the Islamic State and the tribes had killed at least 12 militants, according to police officials quoted in the local media.
Significant questions, however, remain about how much actual support Hatem and his tribal colleagues still have over the tribes in places like Anbar, Salahuddin and Nineveh provinces _ Sunni-dominated parts of Iraq where the Islamic State has dominated since June 9, when its forces overwhelmed Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and the capital of Nineveh.
Many tribesmen have sworn loyalty to the Islamic State, and whether they would really rebel is less clear. The Islamic State has shown itself ready and able to violently suppress dissent among the tribes in other areas of Syria and Iraq that it controls. A recent revolt by a tribe in Deir el Zour province in Syria ended after the Islamic State captured the ringleaders, beheaded some and crucified others, and then posted videos of mass executions on the Internet to make certain the price of rebellion was known.
The Islamic State also is much better armed than the tribes, with vast amounts of heavy weaponry, worth billions, looted from Iraqi and Syrian government stockpiles. A tribal uprising almost certainly would require the direct military support of the Baghdad government or even American ground and air forces, an unlikely prospect.
Hatem also appears to have made a political blunder by adding to his demand a call for Maliki to face criminal charges for his attacks on Sunni population centers. Shiite leaders were openly dismissive.
Asadi, the Shiite member of Parliament, pointed out that Hatem faces treason charges and “is not in good standing with the government.”
“It is better for Mr. Ali Hatem to sit with his tribes and nominate someone to speak for them” in Parliament, Asadi said.
Another Shiite lawmaker, Ali al Fayeh, laughed when a reporter described Hatem’s demands, adding that Hatem should work through Parliament to resolve the dispute.
“He is out of official power. And he’s wanted, so his speech is worthless,” said Fayeh, who is a member of the State of Law coalition, the same as Maliki and Abadi.
McClatchy special correspondent Prothero reported from Irbil; Ashton, a reporter for The News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash., from Baghdad. Email: mprothero@mcclatchydc.com, adam.ashton@thenewstribune.com; Twitter: @mitchprothero, @TNTmilitary
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