Shi’ite list picks al-Jaafari to be Iraq’s prime minister

Soft-spoken Shi’ite leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari emerged yesterday as the top contender to be Iraq’s first freely elected prime minister, having promised an all-inclusive government whose first priority will be to quash the insurgency.

“The Iraqi people are varied, and the government should reflect that variety,” the Dawa party leader recently told The Washington Times, reaching out to Shi’ites, Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians and other non-Muslim groups.

Leaders of the Shi’ite-led coalition that won Iraq’s Jan. 30 elections agreed in principle yesterday that Mr. al-Jaafari would be its candidate to serve as the nation’s chief executive.

The coalition, which will control a slim majority of seats in the new national assembly, could finalize that choice and decide on other Cabinet positions as early as today.

The coalition still will have to strike a deal with other parties to secure the two-thirds majority needed to name a government, but analysts saw little chance that it would be denied its choice of prime minister.

Interviewed last week at his offices in Baghdad’s fortified green zone, Mr. al-Jaafari said the nation’s Sunni minority would be represented in the new parliament, but he drew the line at those thought to be behind the bloody insurgency.

“Those who did not participate in the elections but do not kill, we must win them over and open the door of government, and they will participate and help us in writing the constitution,” he said.

“Others, if they committed criminal acts, we should deal with them by law,” said Mr. al-Jaafari, a gray-bearded 58-year-old physician who spent most of the 1980s as an exile in Iran and Britain.

Dawa is one of Iraq’s two main religion-based Shi’ite movements that joined forces for the elections under the banner of the United Iraqi Alliance. Dawa staged a failed insurrection against Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and 1980s before its leaders fled to Iran.

The other main party in the alliance ” which is blessed by Iraq’s most revered cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani ” is the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, which has close ties to Iran.

With a membership filled out by smaller groupings and people ranging from firebrand cleric Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr to former Pentagon ally Ahmed Chalabi, the alliance won 140 seats in the 275-member national assembly.

Its best chances of cobbling together the two-thirds majority needed to form a government lie in forging an agreement with the Kurds, who will have 75 seats and are demanding the largely ceremonial post of president.

Alternately, a deal with the secular Shi’ite party led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, which won 40 seats, would bring the alliance within four votes of the needed 184.

A first priority for any new government will be to establish a role for the Sunnis, who make up 20 percent of the population but won only six seats because of a boycott and security fears that kept turnout to single digits in some Sunni areas.

That process, seen as critical to undermining support for the insurgency, has begun, said SCIRI’s spokesman in Washington, Karim Khutar al-Musawi.

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