Exiles Form Committee on Iraq’s Future

After days of contention, a conference of Iraqi opposition groups agreed Tuesday on the membership of a committee to shape Iraq’s future in the event President Saddam Hussein is deposed.

U.S. officials hailed the conference as a successful display of Iraqi opposition to Hussein, although the meeting served as much to amplify the exiles’ divisions as it did to quell them.

The 65-member committee was made more than three times as large as originally planned to accommodate the political, ethnic and religious factions jockeying for power in any post-Hussein Iraq. Shiite Muslims, largely denied political power under Hussein and his Sunni Muslim predecessors, hold nearly half the seats.

The exiles will reconvene Jan. 15 in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq to decide on the committee’s leadership, said Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization of opposition groups.

But even as leaders joined in a news conference to proclaim unity, the closing session was marred by a walkout of delegates of five Shiite Muslim groups who said they opposed the apparent dominance of the largest Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, on the committee.