BAGHDAD, June 30: Iraqi militants have rejected the prime minister’s reconciliation plan, a top Sunni leader said on Friday. Muthana Hareth al-Dhari, a leader of the influential Sunni Muslim Scholars Association, dismissed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s plan as little more than ‘a campaign of public relations for the government’.
The plan, which Mr Maliki announced on Sunday in a bid to stem the sectarian violence ravaging Iraq, was ‘meaningless because he has excluded everyone’, Mr Dhari said.
Mr Maliki has said he would only pardon those detainees held in US and Iraqi prisons who have committed no violent crimes and stressed there would be no amnesty to those who killed foreign troops, journalists or innocent Iraqis.
More than 2,500 detainees have been freed this month from US and Iraqi prisons as part of the plan.
Adding to the confusion over his initiative, Mr Maliki said on Wednesday he had been contacted by militant groups willing to lay down their weapons and he would engage them in dialogue directly or through other government officials.
The announcement was hailed by state-owned Iraqiya television and the government-owned Al-Sabah newspaper.
They even named the purported groups which approached Mr Maliki and claimed that tribal leaders from the guerrilla stronghold of Ramadi in Al-Anbar province of western Iraq were acting as go-betweens.
But Mr Dhari said: “Neither the principal armed groups of resistance nor political organisations like ours have accepted this plan which ignores a timetable for the withdrawal of (foreign) troops.
“Nobody knows the so-called organisations mentioned in the government mouthpiece Al-Sabah, and the armed groups mentioned are also unknown.”
Mr Dhari said the main Sunni groups which rejected the proposal were the Brigades of 1920 Revolution, the Rashedeen Army, Islamic Movement of Iraqi Mujahedeen, United Iraqi Jihadist People, and Jaish al-Mujahedeen.
“We are not concerned by this initiative as it does not address the main problem of occupation and also the (terrorist) militias,” said the Brigades of 1920 Revolution in a statement.
A number of militias close to Shia political parties have been blamed for the killings of Sunnis.
The Jaish el-Mujahedeen also discarded the proposal, saying it will not ‘dirty its hands ... by shaking the hands of those who are with the occupiers (US-led forces)’.
ARMY CALLED IN: The governor of the Iraqi province where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed this month called in the army after clashes between Sunni and Shia fighters north of Baghdad on Friday, police and his office said.
But defence ministry spokesman denied receiving a request to dispatch army units to Muqdadiya in Diyala province, an ethnically mixed area where sectarian violence has deepened in recent weeks.
The US military said US-led forces killed three guerillas and captured four in clashes that began on Thursday in the nearby village of Khairnabat, where police and witnesses said Shia militias had attacked Sunnis fleeing the town.
The large, mixed region northeast of Baghdad has seen some of the worst bloodletting since 2003.—Reuters