WASHINGTON, April 24 (UPI) -- The U.S. government was scrambling Thursday to bring the principal Iranian-backed opposition group into the fold of a future transition government for Iraq, while warning Tehran not to interfere in the country's internal affairs.
United Press International has learned that the president's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition, Zalmay Khalilzad, has placed several phone calls to the leadership of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an organization funded by the Iranian government, to invite senior leaders of the organization to a U.S.-sponsored conference in Baghdad scheduled for Monday.
SCIRI protested the first such town hall meeting outside of Nasiriyah in the ancient city of Ur that was held on April 15.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Colin Powell Thursday told a new government-funded Iraqi television station that the United States had told the Iranian government to end efforts to influence events on the ground in Iraq. "We have expressed to the Iranians our concern that while people are expressing their views among the Shiite community in the southern part of the country especially, and we know that there's some movement in from Iran, we would not like to see Iran try to get undue influence and essentially start inserting its own agenda onto Iraq," Powell told Free Iraq television Thursday.
Iran has sent paramilitary units and radical clerics into Iraqi cities including al-Kut, Baghdad, Karbala and Najaf, according to U.S. officials and sources on the ground. In the city of Baqouba, an Iran supported militia killed several men they accused of being Baathists last week. Also the Iranian government has been broadcasting into the country on a channel called Alam.
One way to curb Iran's influence may be to bring the largest opposition group that it supports, SCIRI, into the fold of the transitional government the United States is looking to install. Washington has courted SCIRI since 1999, when the group was made eligible under the Iraqi Liberation Act for military training from the United States. But only until last June did SCIRI reach out to the United States. In August the organization sent Abdelaziz al-Hakim, brother of the group's leader Muhammed Baqr al-Hakim, to Washington where he and other Iraqi exiles met with Vice President Dick Cheney.
SCIRI also controls the largest political faction on an Iraqi leadership panel established in March at a conference in Salahuddin, northern Iraq. But since the beginning of the war, SCIRI has begun to pull support for the American plan to install a transitional government in Baghdad. Its leader, who is still in Iran, has said on many occasions that Shiites would resist and American occupation. Should he or his representative attend the Baghdad meeting, it may signal a rapprochement between the United States and Iran.
Both Kurdish leaders are expected to attend the Baghdad confab for Monday after threatening last week to host their own leadership conference should the Americans delay naming an interim authority. Nonetheless, the United States has not reached a decision on when or how to name the new government for Iraq with bitter divisions between the civilian Pentagon leadership and the State Department and National Security Council.
The Pentagon is pushing to revive the Salahuddin conference while the State Department and the National Security Council have argued for holding more town hall meetings throughout Iraq.
