Sunnis urged to join Iraqi forces: Religious leaders’ appeal
BAGHDAD, April 1: Alarmed at a lack of Sunnis in new Iraqi security forces, religious figures made a radical policy change on Friday by calling on followers to join the police and army. A statement, signed by 64 Sunni leaders, said the group was calling for a halt to attacks against Iraq’s fledgling security forces, spurred on by the heavy troop presence in Sunni flashpoint cities. The statement, handed out at western Baghdad’s Umm al Khora mosque, is a radical policy shift by Sunni leaders who had called on their community to skip January’s elections and generally reject the new democratic Iraq.
“Because the army and police are the safeguard for the nation, as it is the nation’s army and not an army of some militias or any other side, a group of clerics and scholars issued a fatwa to call on the people to join the army,” the statement read.
Until recently, many Sunni leaders lashed out in Friday sermons against joining the US-trained security forces and branded those who did collaborators. Many Sunnis who served in security forces under the Saddam government were enraged by a US decision in May 2003 to dissolve the old army.
Some of those former officers are now believed to form the backbone of Iraq’s deadly resistance. But Samarrai, the head of the Sunni Waqf (religious endowment), explained that the presence of Shia and Kurdish forces in cities like Fallujah, Ramadi, Samarra and Mosul had caused critics of the post-Saddam era to rethink their rejectionist stance.
“Why do we have people from the north or the south coming to our (Sunni) cities. We want people from those cities to be serving their people there. The fatwa is encouraging those people to join the police and army,” Samarrai said.
Samarrai, who is also a member of the Sunni Committee of Muslim Scholars, said the leadership was calling for a halt to attacks on Iraqi forces.
“Yes, this is a message to the resistance fighters not to attack Iraqi army or police.” Ten members of the Committee, which is thought to have back channels to the resistance, signed the document after week-long talks.
The statement included the signatures of such hardline Sunni luminaries as Sheikh Ahmed Hassan al Taha, the preacher at Baghdad’s Abu Hanifa mosque and the Muslim Scholars’ representative in Samarra.
In the last week, Iraqi and US commanders confirmed that the US and Iraqi military effort had relied heavily on a Shia and Kurdish troop presence in strife-torn Sunni cities, including the former guerrilla bastion of Fallujah.
“When we were holding peace talks with the Fallujah people in the old days, they were telling us ‘if you guys are going to come to this city Shias shouldn’t come.’ Right now we have nobody but the Shia (in Fallujah).
“In these areas (like Fallujah) we need forces. In their (Shia) areas, we don’t need forces. We will take forces where we need them to be... These guys (the Shias) wanted to fight.”
US Marine Colonel Stewart Navarre, who spent six months overseeing the training of Iraqi security forces in Fallujah’s troubled Al Anbar province, said it had been virtually impossible to construct a Sunni-based security force.
“The biggest issue is fear and intimidation. People are genuinely afraid of working with the coalition in Anbar province,” he said.—AFP
