Iraqi political parties and coalition authorities are discussing the creation of a 1,000-member militia to bolster the US military's fight against a guerrilla insurgency, US and Iraqi officials said.
The militia would be formed by uniting fighters from five Iraqi political parties under the joint leadership of the US military and the emerging Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, US officials in Baghdad and Washington said on Wednesday on condition of anonymity.
If created, the paramilitary battalion would represent a significant policy reversal by Washington. The US previously declared private militias illegal and called on Iraqi political leaders to disband the groups.
The Pentagon's policy chief said on Wednesday the US would welcome militia members into the Iraqi security forces as long as they agreed to drop their previous party affiliations.
"We are willing to take people into these forces as long as when they come in they are not operating as members of these other [militia] forces," US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith said in Washington.
The militia members would be recruited as individuals, not as intact units, Feith said.
"We are not looking to preserve militias as such," Feith said.
The new president of the Iraqi Governing Council, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite cleric, said the idea of a joint militia was a good one. He said the country's five or so individual militias have won credibility for fighting former president Saddam Hussein's regime for more than 20 years, and could root out that regime's remnants now.
"At this stage, we should try to make use of any force, any tribal clan and any individual that can help," he said, adding that the militias should be centrally controlled, as the Americans have stipulated.
"They will have a role to play in the fight against terrorism," he said.
But the former militia leader also strongly objects to a key part of a US plan to give sovereignty to Iraqis by July 1.
Al-Hakim is in charge only for this month, but his elevation to the top Iraqi office testifies to a post-Saddam regime in which a long-oppressed Shiite majority has emerged as the nation's dominant force.
On Wednesday, he renewed his demands that a transitional legislature be formed by the end of May and should be directly elected rather than selected from regional caucuses.
"The assembly will be elected by the Iraqi people. This is what we are trying to achieve and that's what, God willing, will happen," al-Hakim said.
Under a Nov. 15 agreement between the US-led coalition and the Governing Council, Iraqis will vote in early 2005 for an assembly that would draft a new constitution and twice again before the end of that year -- once to ratify the new constitution and again to choose a government.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell emphasized that the coalition would stick to the original plan, which he said had the support of a majority on the US-appointed council.
Al-Hakim's acceptance of a seat on the Governing Council signaled a new chapter in relations between Washington and the Supreme Council. But al-Hakim has recently been vocal in his opposition of the US political plan for Iraq.
He warned last week of "a real problem in the country" if Iraqis were not allowed to directly elect the transitional legislature.
"It is not possible that a people who spent decades under oppression and sacrificed so many lives are not allowed to directly participate" in the political process, he said.
The Governing Council itself has a Shiite majority, and al-Hakim and other members have cautiously pressed for the council to continue existing after July 1, the date set for it to cede to a new transitional government. On Wednesday, he said the council's fate was still being discussed -- the first indication from a senior member that the future of the body was far from sealed by the Nov. 15 agreement.
Also on Wednesday, US soldiers captured a former Iraqi general suspected of recent contacts with Saddam.
US soldiers captured Brigadier General Daham al-Mahemdi, an ex-colonel of the elite Republican Guard who was promoted to general immediately before the war, in Fallujah, 50km west of Baghdad, the US military said.
Al-Mahemdi is suspected of keeping in indirect contact with Saddam, while directing guerrilla attacks on US soldiers in Fallujah. He was seized without a struggle, along with a pair of AK-47 automatic rifles and other weapons, the military statement said.
In Baghdad, US soldiers and Iraqi police also arrested a close aide to the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt.
Amar Yassiri had been seized in a joint raid in Sadr City, a poor and mainly Shiite district in eastern Baghdad which serves as al-Sadr's main power base.
Kimmitt said Yassiri had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in an Oct. 12 ambush on US troops in Baghdad in which two soldiers died.
Al-Sadr, a harsh US critic, enjoys significant support among Iraq's underprivileged and young Shiites. His supporters have staged several large anti-US protests in recent months and clashed with US forces and followers of other Shiite clerics.
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