Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq - Tag Search

I'll be skeptical of this until the new government is actually seated, but the State of Law alliance announced today that it has agreed to form a coalition (عربي) with the Iraqi National Alliance, the Shi'ite bloc led by the Sadrist movement and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

(Updated below) Aside from the horrific violence in Baghdad and Anbar, the big story in Iraqi newspapers this morning is a rumored reconciliation meeting between prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and Iyad Allawi, the leader of the Iraqiyya coalition. There's one report in Al-Sabaah (عربي), another in Al-Rafidayn (عربي); a short item in Aswat al-Iraq; and so on.

Both men have reportedly agreed to the meeting, in principle, and just need to pick a time.

I was out of town all weekend -- no laptop or anything! -- and apparently picked the worst possible weekend for a trip, because three major Iraq stories broke in the span of 72 hours. So here's my belated attempt to play catch-up -- and an effort to push forward each story based on today's reporting/analysis.

Still far too early to say what will happen with the next Iraqi government; everyone is meeting with everyone else, and nobody wants to tip their hand yet (this Marc Lynch tweet sums it up well). But here's your latest roundup of election news, which includes meetings in Riyadh and possibly Tehran and some speculation about the future of State of Law.

It's the weekend in Iraq, so we'll hear less about post-election political maneuvering for a couple of days -- but two stories worth mentioning this morning. First, Moqtada al-Sadr's supporters have started their referendum to choose the next prime minister.

Iyad Allawi's Iraqiyya coalition may have won the most seats in this month's Iraqi election -- but increasingly it looks like prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition will form the next government, even if Maliki himself loses his job.

Iraq's political parties spent the weekend in feverish negotiations, which seem to be running along two separate tracks. The first is being conducted in Tehran and Najaf, where Maliki's bloc is meeting with the Iraqi National Alliance; a merger between those two would put Maliki within six seats of holding a majority in parliament.

IHEC hasn't released any new results (عربي) today, so the latest official data is still the preliminary results from six provinces reported yesterday.

But the commission did release a statement that generally characterizes the vote in four southern provinces. We already knew prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition did well in Babil and Najaf provinces. The commission says State of Law is also leading in Dhi Qar, Wassit, Qadisiyah and Muthanna provinces. All four are majority-Shi'ite. None are particularly large; Dhi Qar is probably the only one with a population larger than one million.

78,000 Iraqi and international monitors are fanning out across Iraq (عربي) ahead of parliamentary elections on Sunday. It's an admirable effort by 30 international organizations and more than 300 Iraqi groups -- though I would argue that the worst shenanigans (i.e. the de-Ba'athification circus) have already happened. Low-level fraud on election day won't matter nearly as much as the political wrangling that preceded the vote.

Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, isn't happy about yesterday's court decision allowing hundreds of banned candidates to run in the March 7 parliamentary election.

A spokesman for Maliki, Ali al-Dabbagh, said the appellate court's decision is illegal and unconstitutional, and that the law "must be applied as it is." Maliki said the decision is not binding -- a position also adopted by Ali Faysal al-Lami, the chairman of the Justice and Accountability Commission -- and called yesterday for an emergency session of parliament to review the candidates.

The Iraqi prime minister is getting hammered from all sides this morning. Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister and head of the Iraqiyya coalition, accuses Maliki of staging a coup (عربي) against a "peaceful transfer of power" in Iraq.

"The government has made a decision, in collusion with suspicious forces inside and outside Iraq, to exclude important politicians from participating in the political process. The Iraqi people know this is a conspiracy to ignore the will of voters and to exclude opponents of the parties in power... it is a preemptive coup."

Then we have Motqada al-Sadr, who condemns the Maliki government (عربي) for failing to protect the Iraqi people from ongoing violence. "Shame, all shame" on Maliki, Sadr says, "and the blood of the people is on... this government."

Iraqi president Jalal Talabani has ordered a high-level commission to investigate the Justice and Accountability Commission's decision to ban 511 candidates from the March election.

"I myself am not satisfied with the banning decision," said Talabani, a Kurd who heads the three-member presidential council. "We have sent a letter to the Supreme Appeal Court asking whether this committee that issued the decision is legitimate or not."

Talabani's announcement comes 24 hours after Iraqi vice president Tariq al-Hashimi declared the ban illegal. The two men met yesterday at Talabani's home to discuss the decision; neither has released details of the meeting, but it's clear they decided to fight the ban.

Reidar Visser makes an important discovery: Ali Faysal al-Lami, the head of Iraq's Justice and Accountability Commission -- which last week banned nearly 500 candidates from Iraq's March parliamentary election -- is himself a candidate in that election.

Lami is running as part of the Iraqi National Alliance, the coalition led by Iraq's two largest Shi'ite parties: the Sadrist movement and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

In other words: The man who controls the "vetting process for the entire election," as Visser puts it, is himself running for office. Not really a shining moment for Iraq's young democracy.

For those of you who are really, really interested in this subject, Al-Jazeera English's Inside Iraq program did a half-hour show this weekend on the constitutional crisis. It features three Iraqi MPs: Mustafa al-Hiti, Adnan Pachachi, and Abdul-Hadi al-Hassani. Video's after the jump.

Iraq's high electoral commission (IHEC) still hasn't decided whether to approve the de-Baathification commission's request to ban Salah al-Mutlak, and hundreds of other Iraqi politicians, from parliamentary elections in March.

Hamidiyya Husseini, a member of the IHEC, said today that the board has received a formal request (عربي) to exclude Mutlak and the other candidates. The commission said it will decide "within days" whether to approve the request.

Okay, as promised, some more detail on this afternoon's "Iraq in 2020" panel at the Middle East Institute conference. The whole concept was something of a conceit -- as a reader pointed out, there's a lot of uncertainty about Iraq in 2010 -- so most of the panel focused on shorter-term concerns.

I complained earlier about the lack of focus on economics. The panel mostly focused on politics and diplomacy -- how Iraqis will reconcile internally, and how they'll relate to their neighbors (and the U.S.) externally. What really struck me was the divergence between the American panelists, who tended to be more optimistic about the future, and the Iraqi panelists, who seemed pessimistic about intractable problems of Iraqi governance.

Forgot to mention this yesterday, but Nouri al-Maliki formally unveiled his new State of Law political coalition. It contains 40 different parties -- not just Shi'ites, but also Sunni and Kurdish groups.

Maliki decided to form the coalition after refusing to join the new ISCI-Sadr alliance, which refused to promise him another term as prime minister.

One quick thought on Tom Ricks' post about an Odierno-Hill rift. I have zero inside information about their relationship, so I can't assess Tom's basic claim (that the two men don't get along). But I think his criticism is a little misguided on one point.

Nouri al-Maliki announced today that he's breaking away from the Iraqi National Alliance and forming his own "State of Law" coalition in January's election.

No surprise here: Conventional wisdom for the last month has been that Maliki would strike out on his own after the ISCI-Sadrist alliance refused to anoint him as its chosen prime minister. The new coalition sets up an intra-Shi'a battle in January.

Happy Monday morning. Washington's atwitter over the news that Gen. Stanley McChrystal's Afghanistan strategy review was leaked to the Washington Post. (Coincidentally, the document was released just hours after Obama expressed some skepticism about sending more troops to Afghanistan...) WaPo summarizes the report's conclusion:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: "Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."

The full review is posted on WaPo's Web site, if you want to take a look. I'll post some more thoughts this morning after I read the document. Joshua Foust over at Registan says all the important conclusions were leaked over the summer, and that the final report offers nothing new.

The National's Phil Sands had a good item recently about the presence of Iraqi Ba'ath party members in Syria.

Just last month, 30 or so members of the Supreme Leadership for Jihad and Liberation, a network of more than half a dozen insurgent organisations, including the Iraqi Baath Party, held a summit meeting [in Damascus]. Over kebabs and spit-roasted chicken after the conference they discussed how to push the US military out of Iraq and how to topple the government.

I've been trying to figure out why Iraqi-Syrian relations collapsed so quickly, and I think the key to understanding that dynamic lies in Iraqi electoral politics.

Forgot to mention this yesterday, but Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, died from lung cancer in an Iranian hospital at the age of 60.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera all have details about his life and death. His son Ammar will reportedly take over (عربي) the party for the time being.

Juan Cole, writing in Salon, offers some thoughts about what al-Hakim's death means for Iraqi politics.

Important parliamentary elections are scheduled for January, and al-Hakim is not there to lead his own coalition to the polls. His son Ammar is still inexperienced and relatively young. The foremost figure in ISCI outside the al-Hakim family is probably Iraqi vice president Adil Abdul Mahdi, who is widely viewed as a pragmatist rather than a party activist.

Remember, the party announced earlier this week that it wants to align with the Sadrist movement in the January election.