By Vincent Boland and Steve Negus
The Financial Times, 28 February 2006
Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s president, on Tuesday criticised Iraq’s prime minister for making a visit to Turkey, illustrating the deep divisions among Iraqi leaders.
The dispute came as the government in Baghdad claimed that 379 people had died in sectarian violence following last week’s bombing of one of Shia Islam’s most holy sites – an attack that has threatened to derail the formation of a new government.
Mr Talabani said the visit to Ankara by Ibrahim al-Jaafari was undertaken without consulting the Iraqi government. He stressed that any agreements the prime minister made with the Turkish government would not be binding on Iraq.
Mr Jaafari was in Ankara to seek Turkish help in rebuilding Iraq’s water and energy infrastructure and in improving transport links with Turkey.
Mr Talabani, a Kurd from northern Iraq, said: “The Iraqi government is not committed to any agreement that may be reached between the prime minister and the Turkish government.” Mr Jaafari heads a Shia-dominated interim administration in Baghdad. Negotiations on forming a new government – with Kurdish and Sunni Arab parties – have been hampered by fierce ethnic, religious and tribal rivalries.
During his visit to Ankara, Mr Jaafari met Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister. In a speech earlier, Mr Erdogan said the international community had to do more to help Iraq before the crisis there spread to neighbouring countries.
“It is certain that everyone will suffer unless the flames of ethnic tensions that are being provoked are extinguished,” he said.
In Baghdad, the government released its death toll of 379 after the Washington Post newspaper quoted officials at the Baghdad morgue as saying they had received over 1,300 bodies, including many Sunni Arabs abducted and killed by Shia militias.
In a case of conflicting figures that is all too common for Iraq, that figure has been denied however by the morgue’s deputy director.
“There were no more than 265 cases that came [to] the morgue from last Wednesday until Monday,” Abd al-Razzak al-Ubaidi told the FT.
But many of the victims of last week’s violence were killed outside Baghdad, and even in the capital a four-day curfew may have prevented bodies from reaching the morgue.
The controversy over the death toll came as three car bombs exploded yesterday in Baghdad, including one targeting a crowded petrol station in a Shia neighbourhood and another targeting a Shia mosque. The bombs killed 36 people. Another 15 died in the Dora district of Baghdad.
In the predominantly Shia southern province of Amarah, two British soldiers were killed by a car bomb, raising the British death toll in Iraq to 103.
The Sunni-led Iraqi Islamic party reported that a Sunni mosque had been demolished in a north-west Baghdad suburb, and lashed out at the Shia-dominated government which it said “co-operates with the criminal hands that sabotaged God’s houses and lighted the fires of sedition”.
The trial of Saddam Hussein resumed on Tuesday, with prosecutors presenting evidence against the former president including an execution order for 148 people he reportedly signed in 1984.
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Citation: Vincent Boland and Steve Negus. "Iraq’s leaders squabble as death toll mounts," The Financial Times, 28 February 2006.
Original URL: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/19e52b72-a889-11da-aeeb-0000779e2340.html
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