Vol. 72/No. 33      August 25, 2008

The current UN mandate for the more-than-half-decade-long military operation expires in December.

Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations, Hamid Bayati, said an agreement on U.S. military presence was close and that the government planned to submit it to parliament after the summer break.

Under the proposed agreement U.S. troops would hand over parts of the Green Zone—where the U.S. embassy and Iraqi government offices are located—to the Iraqis by the end of 2008. U.S. troops would be off city streets by the middle of next year, and largely withdrawn by 2010. The remaining “support personnel” would stay for about three more years. The proposal includes a clause allowing for the schedule to be changed, if both sides agree.

One Iraqi official said getting the Bush administration to agree to a timetable was a “key achievement,” making it possible that the agreement would be passed by the Iraqi parliament.

A major sticking point in the negotiations is the insistence by the U.S. government that its troops have immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law. The Iraqi side has said it is willing to grant immunity for actions committed on U.S. bases and in combat operations—but not a blanket exemption from Iraqi law, according to press reports.

In a related development, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced August 8 that most of his Mahdi Army will be disarmed. The militia was routed by the Iraqi army in successive battles to oust them from Basra in March and from their stronghold in Sadr City in May.

Mudhafar al-Moussawi, a Shiite cleric and al-Sadr supporter, said most Mahdi militia members will now focus on doing social, religious, and community work. A small number of the militia will remain armed. Al-Sadr spokesman Sheik Salah al-Obeidi said that group would be “small and limited” and will only be allowed to act under direct orders from al-Sadr. They would also not attack Iraqis.

Al-Sadr fled to Iran just ahead of the Bush administration sending 30,000 extra troops to Iraq last year in what was commonly referred to as “the surge.” The Mahdi militia has weakened and divided in the face of the U.S. military escalation. Iraqi government troops took control of Sadr City in May without firing a shot.

Washington considers a law on the provincial elections an important piece of a power-sharing arrangement among competing Shiite and Sunni capitalists in Iraq. President Bush telephoned Iraqi government leaders several times over the first week in August urging them to reach an agreement.  
 
Dispute in Kirkuk
The Iraqi parliament recessed August 6 for its summer break without approving a bill for holding provincial elections this year. Iraqi Kurds are demanding the elections include a vote on whether to incorporate Kirkuk into the Kurdistan autonomous region. The city is the center of Iraq’s northern oil fields.

A bloc of Kurdish parties and allies already control the 41-member Kirkuk provincial council. Turkomen and Sunni Arab capitalist forces have sharply opposed the Kurds and want Kirkuk to remain under control of the central government.

Kurdish representatives walked out of the Iraqi parliament in July in protest against a bill establishing an ethnic quota system on the Kirkuk provincial council and reducing the role of Kurdish security forces there. In their absence the parliament approved the bill.

Some 100,000 Kurds demonstrated July 29 in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan’s regional capital, to protest the parliament’s action. Iraq’s president and leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Jalal Talabani, vetoed the measure and sent it back to parliament. A committee will continue negotiations during the summer recess.

Thousands of Kurds were forcibly removed from Kirkuk and the surrounding area in the 1980s by the Saddam Hussein government. Their lands and homes were given to thousands of Sunni Arabs, many of whom were also forced to move to the area, in an “Arabization” program to strengthen the regime’s hold over the strategic region.  
 
 
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