Shiite Fadila Party Pulls Out of Cabinet Negotiations

A small, influential political party within Iraq’s leading Shiite alliance announced Friday that it was walking out of negotiations over ministerial appointments and that its 15 legislators would play an opposition role in the Council of Representatives.

Al Fadila al Islamiya, or the Islamic Virtue Party, which currently holds the Oil Ministry, had sought to retain the post in the new Cabinet, but met resistance from Prime Minister-designate Nouri Maliki, who has said he wants to appoint nonsectarian politicians to Iraq’s most powerful ministries. His predecessor, Ibrahim Jafari, was criticized for presiding over an ineffective Cabinet divided by religious and ethnic factions.

Maliki’s opposition raised hopes among some politicians that nuclear physicist Hussein Shahristani, an independent Shiite legislator, might be appointed to the post.

Fadila members criticized the plan to give independent politicians a greater role, saying it was backed by the United States.

“The U.S. wants to impose its will on the sovereign ministries by giving them to independent politicians,” said Jabir Khalifa Jabir, Fadila’s deputy secretary general. “That way, they will be under the U.S. control.”

The political wrangling threatens to further delay the announcement of a new Cabinet, the last step in forming the government. U.S. officials believe that naming technocrats and nonsectarian ministers is the only way to quell Iraq’s sectarian violence, which has risen steadily since national parliamentary elections in December.

In a sign of the instability in the country, two Iraqi army units fired at each other after a roadside bomb exploded about 50 miles north of Baghdad.

Soldiers who were trying to transport wounded comrades fired their weapons to clear a path to the hospital, but killed an Iraqi civilian. When another Iraqi unit attempted to detain them, the soldiers of the two units fired upon each other. A third Iraqi army unit cordoned off the area and held the soldiers until U.S. troops arrived.

Also, the U.S. military announced Friday the deaths of four Marines in a motor vehicle accident Thursday in Al Anbar province.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said Wednesday that the Baghdad morgue had registered 1,091 homicide victims, most killed in sectarian violence, in April. He warned that such killings could eventually become more destructive than the insurgency.

President Bush said Friday that if left unchecked, militias could thwart the formation of a unity government in Iraq.

“Perhaps the main challenge is the militia that tend to take the law into their own hands, and it’s going to be up to the government to step up and take care of that militia so that the Iraqi people are confident in the security of their country,” Bush said.

In Iraq, an American official said that leaders of the United Iraqi Alliance rejected Fadila candidates for the post of oil minister to punish it for overreaching in political negotiations earlier this year.

“The Fadila party’s previous secretary general sought to become the prime minister during the spring and they certainly ruffled some feathers,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “So I think what we are seeing in the Cabinet negotiations is some of the rough and tumble of Iraqi politics.”

But other members of the Shiite alliance downplayed Fadila’s exit, characterizing it as temporary political posturing.

“The Fadila party withdrew from the [executive] government, but not from the United Iraqi Alliance,” said Kamal Saadi, of the Islamic Dawa Party, another member of the Shiite bloc. “I think this was a political maneuver to obtain the ministries they want.”

Maliki probably will face even greater obstacles if he attempts to name a replacement for controversial Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, the main party in the bloc. Under his leadership, the ministry has been accused of being under the sway of Shiite militias and death squads targeting Sunni Arabs.

Another contentious issue for Maliki will be disarming the militias. Hadi Amri, the leader of the Badr Brigade, a powerful Shiite militia linked to SCIRI that has been accused of operating secret prisons and assassinating Sunni opponents, pledged that his group would obey Maliki if he issued a disarmament order.

“We will absolutely comply ... because we believe that the armed forces are the only ones who should be able to carry weapons,” Amri told Al Arabiya television.

Influential Shiite cleric Sheik Jalaluddin Saghir, of Baghdad’s Bratha Mosque, gave a Friday sermon at a Najaf mosque that offered an optimistic view of the political process.

“I believe that most of the differences related to the formation of the government have been solved,” said Saghir, who is also a legislator. “The remaining problems are those within the blocs themselves. I think that by next Monday or Thursday the final composition of the government will be revealed.”

But the U.S. official predicted that it would take “at least a week, or maybe longer.”

Shiite leaders downplayed conflicts slowing the political negotiations, and a Sunni cleric in Baghdad offered an impassioned plea to put aside sectarian differences and a scathing criticism of U.S. intervention.

“There is a struggle for posts and ministries and resources -- but what about the continuing bloodshed, the poverty, the displaced families, the horrified children, the tens of thousands of detainees whose fate is vague, the widowers and mothers who still don’t know the reasons for the deaths of their loved ones, the orphans who have no one to consol or guide them?” said Sheik Ahmad Taha at Abu Hanifa mosque.

Times staff writers Suhail Ahmad, Caesar Ahmed, Saif Hameed, Shamil Aziz, Saif Rasheed and special correspondent Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf and a special correspondent in Baqubah contributed to this report.