BAGHDAD (AFP) - A Sunni Arab leader has said insurgents have rejected the Iraqi prime minister's reconciliation plan, as Al-Qaeda supremo I didn't use that word! Not me! Osama bin Laden vowed that the jihad would press on until victory.
"This initiative is a campaign of public relations for the government," Muthana Hareth al-Dhari, a leader from the influential Sunni Arab Muslim Scholars Association, told AFP.
Dhari said the reconciliation plan unveiled on Sunday by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki aimed at stemming the sectarian violence ravaging Iraq's Sunni and Shiite communities was "meaningless because he has excluded everyone". Everyone?
It also aims to encourage die-hard Sunni Arabs like Dhari who refuse to accept the rise to power of the long-oppressed Shiites to abandon their sympathies for armed struggle and join the political process. Maliki has said he would only pardon those detainees held in US and Iraqi prisons who have committed no violent crimes and stressed there would be no amnesty to those who killed foreign troops, journalists or innocent Iraqis.
More than 2,500 detainees have been freed this month from US and Iraqi prisons as part of the plan. Adding to the confusion over his initiative, Maliki said Wednesday he had been contacted by insurgent groups willing to lay down their weapons and he would engage them in dialogue directly or through other government officials.
The announcement was hailed by state-owned Iraqiya television and the government-owned Al-Sabah newspaper.
They even named the purported insurgent groups which approached Maliki and claimed that tribal leaders from the rebel stronghold of Ramadi in Al-Anbar province of western Iraq were acting as go-betweens.
"Neither the principal armed groups of resistance nor political organisations like ours have accepted this plan which ignores a timetable for the withdrawal of (foreign) troops," said Dhari.
"Nobody knows the so-called organisations mentioned in the government mouthpiece Al-Sabah and the armed groups mentioned are also unknown." Are they part of the 'everyone' excluded by Maliki?
Dhari said the main Sunni groups which rejected the proposal were the Brigades of 1920 Revolution, the Rashedeen Army, Islamic Movement of Iraqi Mujahedeen, United Iraqi Jihadist People, and Jaish al-Mujahedeen. The plan was also rejected Tuesday by an eight-member coalition of militant groups in Iraq led by Al-Qaeda according to a statement posted on the Internet.
And on Friday an Internet-posted voice message purported to be from bin Laden paid tribute to the network's leader in Iraq, Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who was killed in a US air strike on June 7. "We will keep up our fight to bleed your money dry, kill your men and so that (your forces) go home defeated, as we defeated you in Somalia," bin Laden told US President George W. Bush.
"The banner (of jihad holy war) has not fallen. It will be picked up by another lion of Islam," he said in the message whose authenticity could not be immediately confirmed.
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