US rejects Sunnis' plea for timetable: Troop pullout
BAGHDAD, Jan 10: American embassy officials held unprecedented weekend talks with influential Sunni religious leaders but turned down an offer under which Sunni political parties would end their boycott of Jan 30 elections, diplomats said Monday.
"Senior embassy officials met with them. They obviously discussed Sunni participation in the political process," a US official said on Monday. The members of the Committee of Muslim Scholars, which groups 3,000 Sunni mosques across Iraq, said they would lift their boycott on voting if the US government provides, under international auspices, a timeframe for American withdrawal from Iraq, the official said.
"We're not going to do that," the official said. The influential religious body, founded in the days after the fall of Saddam Hussein's government, called for a general boycott of the electoral process after US troops attacked Fallujah on Nov 8.
The group has been accused of links to militants across central Iraq. The religious figures are considered the most developed Sunni social organization in Iraq. Their boycott of the election preceded last month's pullout of Iraq's Islamic Party, a Sunni political grouping with a national following, from the Jan 30 polls.
RESISTANCE GROWING: Violence has spiked against Iraqi and US forces in the battleground provinces of north-central Iraq, with less than three weeks to go before landmark national elections.
US army officers at their headquarters in Saddam Hussein's old palace in Tikrit describe an insurgency that has grown since last March despite the best efforts to win over the Iraqi people living in the northern provinces of Salahuddin, Diyala and Tamim, home to Iraq's alienated Sunni Muslims.
"What we've seen was the insurgency gather steam since last April and May. It probably would have gained steam a whole lost faster if it were not for courageous Iraqi national guard and police standing up for their country," said Major General John Batiste, commander of the First Infantry Division (1st ID).
Despite the militants' ability to recruit new members, Batiste believes the US army is winning in Iraq. He points to the training of 11,000 Iraqi national guardsmen in his area of operations which he considers a success story. -AFP
