Shiites Question U.S. Overtures to Sunni Rebels

It didn’t take long for fresh reports of U.S. talks with Sunni Arab insurgents to stir cries of an impending sellout.

“The Americans and everyone else must understand that the Iraqi people will never accept any talks with the criminals who have blood on their hands,” Sheik Jalaluddin Saghir, a prominent Shiite Muslim cleric and member of parliament, declared during Friday prayers.

A senior U.S. official here sought to provide damage control. There was no intent, he declared, to undermine the fledgling Shiite-run government, which meets behind U.S.-fortified blast walls.

“In the end, we are not going to hand to the insurgency the head of the Iraqi government on a platter,” the U.S. official told reporters Friday. “It isn’t going to happen.”

The exchange underscored the fragility of the political compromise that the Bush administration is seeking to facilitate in Iraq, even as the complementary military strategy -- turning more and more responsibility over to fledgling Iraqi forces -- has yet to prove a success.

U.S. commanders say they hope a drawdown of the 140,000-strong American force in Iraq can begin sometime next year. But no one will publicly say how many of Iraq’s 100-plus U.S.-trained battalions are ready to wage a difficult counterinsurgency campaign without U.S. assistance.

“That information is classified,” Brig. Gen. Don Alston, chief spokesman for the multinational forces, said here last week. “I wouldn’t want to reveal something that could be an advantage to the enemy.”

Things are no less murky on the political front, where reports of U.S. overtures to the Sunni Arab-driven insurgency immediately sparked a backlash last week among the long-repressed Shiite majority.

Much hinges on a two-part premise. First, that disaffected Sunni Arabs can be brought into the political process, and second, that participating Sunni representatives can sway militants, who have denounced the government, to put down their arms.

There is certainly reason to believe that Sunni Arabs, who largely boycotted the Jan. 30 election, will be more involved now.

Victorious Shiites and Kurds have reached out to bring Sunni Arabs into the committee drafting a constitution. Many Sunni Arabs now rue the decision to not vote. Plans are progressing on a new electoral law that would require the next set of lawmakers to be elected by provincial districts, probably ensuring greater Sunni Arab representation.

But few believe that these developments, however positive, will soon defuse the insurgency, which even in U.S. assessments is no weaker than it was six months ago.

The Sunni Arab representatives willing to take part in writing the constitution have acknowledged little leverage with the men with guns, and there is no broad Sunni call to lay down arms.

“The Iraqi resistance is not seeking a solution but defending a cause,” said Sheik Khalaf Duleimi of the National Dialogue Council, a Sunni group involved in writing the constitution. “The government should seek a solution.”

U.S. officials often point out that violence in Iraq is largely confined to four of the 18 provinces. Much of the Shiite south and Kurdish north is relatively quiet. But those four battleground provinces are home to about 40% of the population and include Mosul and Kirkuk, the multiethnic hubs of the north, and the capital, Baghdad, where sectarian-tinged bombings, assassinations and abductions are daily events.

Early Saturday, the bodies of 11 police recruits, covered with light-purple sheets, were placed inside the morgue at the capital’s Yarmouk Hospital. They were the victims of the latest bombing at a police recruiting center, this one by an attacker wearing an explosives-laden vest laced with ball bearings that burst out in a fusillade of deadly shrapnel.

“Oh, my son Malik!” cried a sobbing father seated outside the morgue, in a scene that has become agonizingly familiar. “I saw you get married and start your new life. Why did it have to end like this? Why?”

Although most of the slain recruits have been Shiites, Sunnis accuse militias and police squads associated with Shiites of retaliatory attacks on Sunni clerics and civilians.

The latest rumor sweeping Baghdad is that the Badr Brigade, an Iranian-trained Shiite militia, is targeting Iraqi pilots who bombed Iran during the 1980s war between the two nations.

Amid so much uncertainty, hostility and bloodshed, American officials are expressing confidence that Iraqis will meet three impending deadlines: Aug. 15, when a draft constitution is supposed to be ready; Oct. 15, when a constitutional referendum is to be held; and Dec. 15, when a permanent government is to be elected.

The State Department is pressuring Iraqis to get everything done on time, fearful that any delay will provoke even more instability.

The Bush administration views all three deadlines as crucial guideposts on the road to an exit strategy from a war in which the U.S. death toll is approaching 2,000.

But other milestones -- the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003, the return of sovereignty a year ago, the landmark January election -- have all passed without the anticipated letup in violence. In each case, exhilaration turned to disappointment.

In November, Marine Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler declared that the invasion of the former rebel-held enclave of Fallouja had “broken the back” of the insurgency. Yet the last two months saw 155 U.S. troops killed in Iraq, among the highest monthly death tolls of the war. Among the dead were six Americans, including three women, killed by a suicide bomber in Fallouja, which remains a trouble spot despite the continued presence of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops who have in effect sealed off the city.

There simply aren’t enough troops and police to watch over every stretch of volatile terrain. In the vast Sunni homeland of western Iraq, Marines have launched a series of offensives that seem destined to repeat the war’s numbing pattern: Thinly stretched U.S. troops clear out a rebel town and return to their bases, allowing fighters to filter back in.

“We cannot defend everywhere,” Col. Bob Chase, chief of operations for the 2nd Marine Division in western Iraq, said recently. Insurgents “will attempt to fill the vacuum.”

U.S. officials, who have acknowledged that military superiority is not enough to win the war in Iraq, are keen to know what it will take to get the guerrillas to put down their arms -- hence the ongoing exploratory talks with Sunni sheiks and community leaders thought to have links to the insurgency.

The ultimate U.S. approach is a classic divide-and-conquer strategy: separate “nationalist” elements of the fragmented insurgency from religious militants and foreign jihadists, who are regarded as irredeemable.

“It is credible that parts of this disparate group of insurgents and terrorists would consider finding a way to participate in a political process,” another senior U.S. official here said recently.

U.S. commanders even seem prepared to consider some kind of Sunni-dominated force in volatile Al Anbar province, despite the disastrous experience last year with the Fallouja Brigade, a U.S.-armed unit that ultimately sided with the insurgents and was disbanded.

“You want the Americans out of Al Anbar?” a senior U.S. commander asked rhetorically in a recent interview. “Then get ... to the table, create an environment where we can provide some basic security for Iraq, and we’ll get ‘em out. That ain’t hard to do.”

But the Sunni religious militants and their Iraqi nationalist allies have, by all accounts, cooperated closely and may be harder to separate than many believe.

And it seems clear that the guerrillas, who have proved to be determined and crafty, are insisting on at least one clear concession -- a timetable for U.S. withdrawal -- that the Bush administration has no intention of granting, at least for now.

“We will stay in the fight until the fight is won,” President Bush said in a radio address Saturday, echoing his message in a prime-time address last week.

“In the end,” said the senior U.S. official who spoke Friday, “the Sunni Arab community that fuels the insurgency is going to get more out of the political process than out of a military confrontation that it cannot hope to win.”

Commanders in the field here often point out a thorny reality: The “bad guys” don’t have to win. They only have to make headlines.

The most likely scenario this year, many agree, is the birth of both a new constitution and a new government -- even as the fighting, and dying, continues. It is not a cheerful prognostication, but it is the state of affairs to which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld alluded when he said recently that the fighting could continue for a dozen years.

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Times staff writers Borzou Daragahi, Suhail Ahmad and Shamil Aziz and special correspondent Asmaa Waguih contributed to this report.