Baghdad: Tribal leaders and clerics from Iraq’s Sunni heartland offered their conditional backing on Friday for a new government that hopes to contain sectarian bloodshed and an offensive by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) militants that threatens to tear the country apart.
One of the most influential tribal leaders said he was willing to work with Shiite prime minister-designate Haider Al Abadi provided a new administration respected the rights of the Sunni minority that dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussain.
Ali Hatem Sulaiman left open a possibility that Sunnis would take up arms against the Isil militants in the same way as he and others joined US and Shiite-led government forces to thwart an Al Qaida insurgency in Iraq between 2006 and 2009.
Yet amid the signs that political accords were possible in the fractious nation, some 80 members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority were “massacred” by Islamic State insurgents, a Yazidi lawmaker and two Kurdish officials said on Friday.
Al Abadi faces the daunting task of pacifying Iraq and particularly the vast desert province of Anbar. It forms much of the border with Syria, where the Islamist fighters also control swathes of territory.
Sunni alienation under outgoing Shiite premier Nouri Al Maliki goaded some in Anbar to join Isil’s revolt that is now drawing the United States and European allies back into varying degrees of military involvement in Iraq to contain what they see as a militant threat that goes well beyond its borders.
Winning over Sunnis will be vital to any efforts to contain the violence marked by daily kidnappings, execution-style killings and bombings.
Taha Mohammad Al Hamdoon, spokesman for the tribal and clerical leaders, told Reuters that Sunni representatives in Anbar and other provinces had drawn up a list of demands.
This would be delivered to Al Abadi, a member of the same Shiite Islamist party but with a less confrontational reputation than Al Maliki, who announced on Thursday he would stand down.
Hamdoon called for the government and Shiite militia forces to suspend hostilities in Anbar to allow space for talks.
“It is not possible for any negotiations to be held under barrel bombs and indiscriminate bombing,” Hamdoon said in a telephone interview with Reuters. “Let the bombing stop and withdraw and curtail the [Shiite] militias until there is a solution for the wise men in these areas.” Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, said the handover of power offered a rare opportunity to resolve the crisis.
He told feuding politicians to live up to their “historic responsibility” by cooperating with Al Abadi as he tries to form a new government and overcome divisions among the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities that deepened under Al Maliki.
Al Sistani, a reclusive octogenarian whose authority few Iraqi politicians would dare openly challenge, also had pointed comments for the military, which offered no serious resistance when Isil staged its lightning offensive in June.
