Shia pick Jaafari to head new regime in Iraq

Iraq: Incumbent Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari was chosen yesterday as the nominee of the Shia United Iraqi Alliance to head the country's new government.

A caucus of the alliance, which won 128 of the 275 seats in parliament in the December election, gave Dr Jaafari, spokesman of the Dawa party, 64 votes against 63 for his rival Adil Abdel Malek, one of Iraq's two vice-presidents and US favourite.

Dr Jaafari, a Shia born in 1947 in the holy city of Kerbala and trained as a physician in Mosul, joined the outlawed Dawa party as a young man.

He fled Iraq in 1980 and lived nine years in exile in Tehran before settling with his family in London. His wife is also a medical doctor.

While he was one of the senior figures to insist on a leading role for Islamic law in the new Iraqi constitution, he does not agree with fundamentalists who seek to relegate women to their homes or ban women from driving cars. However, he follows the practice of conservatives and does not shake hands with women.

When Dr Jaafari served in the ceremonial role of vice-president in the US-appointed interim government, polls showed he was the most popular figure in Iraq after Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. This prompted Shias and Kurds to choose him as premier in the transitional cabinet.

However, during the past year he has been widely criticised for failing to bring the alienated Sunnis into government as well as to deliver security, electricity and running water to the majority of hard-pressed Iraqis. He has also been blamed for not curbing rampant corruption.

Dr Jaafari would like to see Iraq to emerge as an Islamic state ruled by laymen rather than clerics. He represents both a more conservative religious trend and greater independence from Tehran than Mr Abdel Malek, who began his political career as a Marxist and became a Baathist before turning to religious politics. He was the candidate of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an offshoot of Dawa formed under Iranian auspices during two decades of exile in Tehran.

Dr Jaafari was more acceptable than Mr Abdel Malek to radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, the king-maker, who controls at least 30 votes in the alliance.

Mr Sadr adopts a strong anti-occupation stance and insists that Iraq should keep its distance from Iran. He is also seen as the main rival to SCIRI which has lost political ground in recent months.

Its head, Abdel Aziz Hakim, has taken a hard line against Sunnis, while outgoing interior minister Bayan Jabr, former commander of SCIRI's Badr Brigade militia, is accused by both Sunnis and Shias of deploying Shia-staffed police and army special force units as sectarian death squads targeting Sunnis. This has led to sectarian cleansing in mixed neighbourhoods of the capital and towns and villages throughout the country.

Consequently, many Iraqis believe that in spite of his failings, Dr Jaafari rather than SCIRI's Abdel Mahdi is better placed to form a national government embracing the country's main sects. The next step will be to choose a speaker of parliament and president. Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, the serving president, is considered the most likely choice for the presidency, although there is tension between the Kurds and Dr Jaafari. He has refused to formally recognise their autonomy and implement steps which would permit them to incorporate into their region Kirkuk and its oil fields, a move opposed by Arabs and Turkomen who form two-thirds of the city's inhabitants.

Last week, the Sunni religious Iraqi Accord Front, with 44 seats, and two secular parties, the Iraqi National List of former premier Ayad Allawi, with 25, and the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue, with 11, formed an 80-member opposition bloc, just eight seats short of the one-third blocking minority needed to prevent the Shias and Kurds from winning approval of their candidates for the top jobs.

If dissident alliance members and representatives of small communal parties join with this bloc, they could prevent the Shia-Kurdish alliance, which dominated the outgoing assembly, from exercising control over the new four-year parliament.