March 2, 2003	Sunday	Zul Hijjah 28, 1423

SALAHADDIN (Iraq), March 1: A bid by Iraqi opposition groups to stake their claim to the future leadership of a post-Saddam Hussein government has ended in an acrimonious showdown with the United States, officials revealed on Saturday.

As opposition officials were struggling to wrap up four days of key talks in Kurdish rebel-held northern Iraq, delegates said there had been an angry exchange with a US envoy over Washington’s plans to install a military government, control the country’s oil fields and allow in Turkish troops.

With US-opposition relations in disarray and the dissidents here still battling their own divisions, all indications were pointing to a difficult task ahead for the United States after it invades Iraq.

Top of the list of arguments between many top delegates and Zalmay Khalilzad, President George W. Bush’s hawkish pointman on regime change, was a US plan to place an American commander in charge of Iraq for an interim period.

“Khalilzad mentioned that a military governor will rule Iraq because we were not ready,” said Warith al-Kindi, an information officer with the Supreme Assembly for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI).

“So we told him that if America thinks it was treated badly in Somalia, how does it think it will be treated in Iraq? After all these years of suffering, why should we live under foreign occupation?” he asked.

Al-Kindi accused Washington of trying to pressure the opposition into giving prominent positions to pro-Israeli delegates, agreeing to US protection of Iraq’s oil fields and playing down the role of Islam in any future political or legal system.

Another close aide to SAIRI chief delegate Abdul Aziz al-Hakim described former oil man Khalilzad as a “bully”.

After the US envoy told delegates a future government had to include “those who have suffered under Saddam,” the opposition were left feeling sidelined and fearing the US meant inclusion of Baath party regime insiders in a post-Saddam administration.

Late on Friday, Khalilzad was whisked away from this hilltop town by his team of heavily-armed diplomatic security guards, leaving opposition spokesman Hoshyar Zebari attempting to put a brave face on the abrupt departure.

The other major sticking point with the United States, especially for the Iraqi Kurdish groups, was over Turkey.

On Friday there an angry outburst by a leading member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Sami Abdul Rahman, who said that any US-Turkey deal allowing a Turkish incursion into northern Iraq — in return for Washington being granted a key second front — would amount to a “betrayal” and meet stiff resistance.

“In my lifetime, twice the United States government has betrayed us,” Abdul Rahman said, referring to the catastrophic Kurdish uprisings of 1975 and 1991. “Now, if this goes ahead, it will be a third betrayal in one generation.”

Seeking to keep the lid on the crisis, Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) leader Jalal Talabani said only that the opposition remained in the dark over the US-Turkey deal, as well as US plans for an interim military government.

But there were also snags with the deal struck by the notoriously fractured opposition alliance, a brittle mosaic of hardline Iranian-backed Islamists, Kurdish nationalists and slick, whisky-drinking secularists who owe much of their survival to CIA cash.

They agreed to appoint a six-man leadership council they assert should form the core of a future government, in defiance of the US.

The leadership council members were named as Talabani, KDP leader Massoud Barzani, Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, the SAIRI’s al-Hakim, Ayad Allawi of the Iraqi National Accord and Adnan Pachachi, an independent.

But Pachachi, an 80-year-old exile and former foreign minister who was not attending the meeting here, said he would not take part.

Talabani asserted that this was “some kind of misunderstanding.”

Crucially, Pachachi was the Sunni Arab representative on the council, and his snub was a major blow to the opposition’s efforts to woo a minority community that has dominated Iraq since the country was established in 1922.

Forced to extend the meeting into Saturday, delegates were left labouring over a joint statement in which every word needed to be approved by the array of factions and their competing agendas.

And in an embarrassing final day to the talks, the opposition announced four consecutive postponements to the release of their final statement, a document expected to map out their political strategy for the looming war and its aftermath.—AFP