New Iraqi leaders exploit bloodshed

BAGHDAD — New leaders are springing up in the latest spasm of violence in Iraq, trumpeting grass-roots support but few or no ties to the U.S.-led coalition forces controlling the nation.

These latest players include an association of Sunni clerics, “the Prince of the Marshes” from southern Iraq and an outspoken Shi’ite female dentist.

The rise of the new figures is largely at the expense of politicians with links to the U.S.-led provisional authority in Iraq. Their arrival comes as Iraqi leaders are wrangling over who will make up a government that is to take power from coalition administrators June 30.

On that day, the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council — a 25-member body that has served as an interim government since July, but failed to win the trust of many Iraqis — likely will be dissolved.

U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who was asked to come up with a plan for the transition, has proposed the council be replaced by a caretaker government of “men and women known for their honesty, integrity and competence.”

Mr. Brahimi did not say who he had in mind.

But many Iraqis are starting to see those qualifications in the rising stars: the Islamic Clerics Committee — a Sunni group — and Shi’ite Governing Council members Abdul-Karim al-Mohammedawi and Salama al-Khufaji.

Vehemently anti-occupation, the Sunni committee was formed a year ago but had been sidelined by the newly powerful Shi’ite clergy. For months the committee struggled to give a voice to Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority, demoralized by the loss of its position of power under deposed dictator Saddam Hussein.

The current upsurge of violence boosted the committee’s fortunes and influence.

The Sunni clerics have used their leverage to win release of some 20 foreign hostages snatched in a wave of abductions that accompanied this month’s violence.

Images of the smiling clerics embracing freed hostages have been beamed daily by Arab satellite-TV stations widely seen in Iraq, and the releases have won thanks from foreign embassies.

The committee says it has no contacts with the abductors, arguing that its “patriotic” anti-occupation stance persuades kidnappers to heed their appeal for release of captives not directly involved in military operations.

The clerics’ group has won the regard of residents of Fallujah, a hotbed of anti-American violence. It organized aid convoys into the city, and its main mosque in Baghdad became a refuge for residents who flee.

The committee has been sharply critical of the Marine siege of Fallujah and what it calls a high death toll among civilians there.

“In the course of a year, we took Iraq by storm and won the trust of everyone,” spokesman Mohammed Bashar al-Faidhi said in an interview. “The Americans have sidelined us because we don’t accept that their presence here is legitimate. This stance gave us leverage in the street because people began to sense that we speak what is on their minds.”

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