Iraqi Conferences

This from ThreatsWatch.org. It's informative to see that the political/religious leaders are trying to move into conferences with various groups in the country. Hopefully this can aid in stemming some of the sectarian violence that looks to be approaching civil war.

The same article reports that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has succeeded in arranging a meeting between Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, head of SCIRI and Iraq’s most important non-office-holding Shia political figure, and Harith al-Dari, the general secretary of the MSA. SCIRI and the MSA have traded accusations over the past two years, with SCIRI recently claiming that the MSA had not broken its links with al-Qaeda (such links clearly existed from 2003 through part of 2005) while the MSA has accused SCIRI’s militia, the Badr Corps, of operating death squads out of the interior ministry. That Badr has not been implicated in recent atrocities, combined with the MSA’s disenchantment with Sadr, appears to be leading to this thawing of relations.

On a related point, the Iraqi newspaper Al-Rafidayn reports that the National Reconciliation Committee, led by Akram al-Hakim, agreed upon four conferences to be held by the end of the year -

1) a conference of parties which have not yet joined the political process,
2) a conference of Shia and Sunni religious scholars which would take place in Jordan or Saudi Arabia,
3) a conference for civil society organizations, and
4) a conference for Iraq’s tribes.

Akram was quoted as saying that of the Sunni insurgent factions with which he was now discussing terms, one was an armed faction of major significance.

National Reconciliation Committee? That's interesting. This makes one wonder if the armed militias chosen to go to the conferences will be chosen before or after the US/Iraqi actions in Baghdad.