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Iraq : PM declares amnesty to end militancy |
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The Iraqi Interim Prime Minister, Ayad Allawi, has signed a long-awaited amnesty law pardoning militants who had committed minor crimes. The amnesty which had been expected to be a key element in the interim Government’s efforts to end a 15-month old militancy, and announced on Aug 7, does not cover those who killed American troops or Iraqis. Those eligible for the amnesty include people in possession of light arms and explosives, those who hid intelligence about terrorist groups and people who helped those groups commit crimes, Allawi said. To fight the Saddam regime remnants who have taken up arms against the US forces and the new Iraqi force, support is growing in favour of a Saudi proposal to set up a peace-keeping force drawn up from the Islamic countries. The Saudi Arabian leaders made the proposal when the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, recently visited Riyadh. He has given a cautious welcome to the initiative.
The attack on churches during the week and the confrontation with the Mehdi militia of the Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, which killed 300 of his men further enforced the need for such a force now that after a spree of kidnappings and beheadings, more and more countries are inclined to withdraw their forces and refuse to commit more troops. Car bombs exploded outside at least six Christian churches in Iraq on August 1, killing at least three people and wounding many more in an apparently coordinated attack timed to coincide with evening prayers. While four blasts took place at churches in Baghdad, two were in Mosul. At least two of the Baghdad blasts were suicide car bomb attacks. The attacks were the first to target Christian churches during the 15-month insurgency. The Iraqi Government has blamed al-Qaeda ally, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for a series of church bombings saying the aim was to spark religious strife and drive Christians out of the country.
Days after the attacks on Churches, fierce clashes between supporters of the militant cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and US and Iraqi forces in the key city of Najaf on August 6 threatened to trigger a renewed uprising across southern Iraq. The fragile peace that has held in the holy city since June was shattered by deadly fighting that began late on August 4 and continued well into the late hours of Aug 6. US forces say they killed 300 members of al-Sadr’s Mehdi militia while al-Sadr put the casualties as 36 killed. Fighters loyal to al-Sadr shot down a US helicopter in fierce clashes in Najaf. There are conflicting accounts of what sparked the violence as each side blamed the other for violating the terms of a ceasefire that ended the uprising in June. But it followed days of mounting tension during which Sadr’s supporters had seized 18 Iraqi police officers in response to the arrest of several of the cleric’s senior aides. The US military said, fighting began after a police station was attacked by a large number of “aggressors”.
Under the peace deal hammered out in June, US troops said they would not enter parts of Najaf close to the shrine of the Imam Ali, one of the holiest sites in the Shia faith. Many Iraqi Shias were outraged when the golden-domed shrine was twice damaged during fighting between US forces and al-Sadr’s fighters in May. Since then, Mehdi guerillas have controlled access to the sacred site which in more peaceful times attracts millions of foreign pilgrims.
Meanwhile, a US woman soldier at the centre of abuse at the Abu Gharaib jail, the 21-year-old Lynndie England, appeared before a military judge at Forg Bragg, North Carolina, who will determine whether she should face a court martial on 19 charges of assault, misconduct and posing for what the military termed “numerous wrongful photographs”, including the now infamous one of her holding a naked prisoner on a leash. Described as “woman with the leash”, she was the last but best known of seven accused soldiers to enter a military courtroom on charges of prisoners abuse in Iraq. She is six months pregnant and she said that Charles Graner, who prosecutors say was a ring leader of the abuse, is the father of the child she is carrying. Investigators said they discovered one thousand photographs and additional videos on computers owned by various soldiers showing detainees being sexually humiliated or mistreated or soldiers engaged in various kinds of sexually inflected misconduct. She told Army investigators that she was photographed with Iraqi detainees arranged in sexually humiliating positions “just for fun”.
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