Iraq Shiite Alliance May Link With Kurd Parties,
Chalabi Says
March 8, 2005

By Bloomberg:

The cleric-backed coalition that won the most seats in Iraq's Jan. 30 election for a national assembly may join forces with the second-placed Kurdish Alliance, Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the coalition, said.

''There is a desire to reach an agreement and there are positive developments toward that,'' Chalabi, once a Pentagon- backed candidate for prime minister, told Doha, Qatar-based al- Jazeera television in a live interview. There are at least two rounds of talks scheduled for today, Chalabi said.

The United Iraqi Alliance, which gained 140 seats in the vote and lost at least 15 when two parties withdrew their support March 6, has nominated Dawa party leader and interim vice president Ibrahim al-Jaafari as its candidate for prime minister. He's running against Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi whose Iraqi List party took 40 seats. Chalabi withdrew his candidacy to head the alliance last month.

Both groups have been courting the Kurds for weeks in an attempt to create a coalition capable of commanding the two thirds majority needed to create a new government.

The 275-seat assembly will convene for the first time on March 16 even if a government isn't selected by then, Rowsch Shaways, Iraq's second interim vice president, said yesterday. Hussein Shahristani, a senior member of the United Iraqi Alliance, told Agence France-Presse he thinks a final agreement will be reached before the session starts.

The 77-seat strong Kurdish Alliance has repeatedly outlined a set of demands that Kurdish leaders insist must be met in return for their support; among them the creation of a federal, secular state and the extension of the autonomous Kurdish region to cover all areas once inhabited by Kurds, including the oil- rich city of Kirkuk.

Compromise

For an agreement to work, the United Iraqi Alliance would have to drop its desire to entrench Islamic law into the constitution and allow the Kurdish Peshmerga militia to continue in existence in the three Northern Iraqi provinces, known as Kurdistan, that border Turkey and Iran.

The Kurds also want Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a leading Alliance party, to become president.

''The Kurdish leadership will ally itself with any political entity that won seats, on the condition that it recognizes and supports the rights of the Kurdish people and their goals,'' Talabani said in a March 4 statement posted on the PUK Web site.

Chalabi, who lived in Kurdistan when he opposed the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, suggested in today's interview with Al- Jazzera that the top post in the new government won't go
to Allawi.

''We won't give the post of prime minister to any one outside the Alliance that the majority of 8.55 million Iraqis voted for,'' Chalabi said.

Allawi has turned down an offer from the Shiite Alliance to participate in the coalition government that will be formed, Agence France-Presse reported citing Shahristani.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Caroline Alexander in London at calexander1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Peter Torday at ptorday@bloomberg.net

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