Baghdad, Iraq – Iraq’s dominant Shiite political bloc fractured Sunday when its most powerful faction publicly demanded that the incumbent Shiite prime minister resign over his inability to form a unified government.
The split came as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Jack Straw, the British foreign minister, paid an urgent surprise visit to Baghdad leaders to convey in the most forceful terms yet that their patience for Iraq’s political paralysis is wearing out.
It was not clear whether the joint visit by Rice and Straw, the top emissaries of the two countries that led the invasion of Iraq three years ago, played a direct role in the fracturing of the Shiite bloc and whether that split would lead to forward movement on forming a new government, which has been stalled for months.
But the developments suggested a new phase in Iraq’s convulsions may have started by opening a possibly violent battle for the country’s top job between rival Shiite factions, which both have militias backing them up. The incumbent prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, has said he will fight to keep his job, and his principal supporter is Muqtada al-Sadr, a rebellious cleric whose Mahdi Army militia has resorted to violence many times to enforce his wishes.
Rice and Straw, who came to Iraq unannounced from a meeting in England punctuated by war protests, told reporters they did not want to intervene in the dispute over the prime minister, but at the same time they pointed out that al-Jaafari had been unable to win enough political support to form a government since his nomination Feb. 11.
“They’ve got to get a prime minister who can actually form the government,” Rice said after meetings with Iraqi leaders – including a visibly uncomfortable photo session with al-Jaafari – inside the Green Zone, the fortified part of Baghdad that houses the Iraqi government and U.S. Embassy. She added, “I told them that a lot of treasure, a lot of human treasure, has been put on the line to give Iraq the chance to have a democratic future.”
Neither Rice nor Straw would specify what pressure, if any, was brought to bear on the Iraqi leaders, but Rice’s references to the loss of lives – more than 2,300 U.S. soldiers have died here since the March 2003 invasion – and the enormous sums of money spent clearly reflected the growing impatience in Washington and London for progress.
The fracturing of the Shiites became clear in the late afternoon, as a senior official in the leading Shiite party, Sheik Jalaladin al-Sagheir, said in a telephone interview that his party was putting forward another candidate to replace al-Jaafari.
“I’ve asked Jaafari to resign from his job,” said al-Sagheir, a deputy to the Shiite bloc’s leader, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim. “The prime minister should have national consensus inside the parliament, and he should have the support of the international body.”
Any dispute between the Shiite bloc’s two biggest factions – al-Hakim’s party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the party led by al-Sadr – carries with it the possibility of armed violence.
Both factions are longtime rivals, have backing from Iran and operate militias with members in the Iraqi security forces. Their militias fought street battles in August throughout Baghdad and the south, even hijacking double-decker buses to storm office buildings.
Nasr al-Saadi, an al-Sadr member of parliament, said Sunday that al-Jaafari still had the backing of the al-Sadrists.
“He was elected in a democratic way,” al-Saadi said, referring to the fact that al-Jaafari won his nomination in a secret ballot among the Shiite bloc’s 130 members.
The rupture among the Shiites also could completely redraw Iraq’s political coalitions, if some Shiite politicians leave the bloc amid the feuding to side with other groups in the 275- member parliament. That would weaken the religious Shiites, and it is one of the great fears of the most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani.
Since cobbling together the fragile Shiite coalition in late 2004, the ayatollah and his aides have been working hard to keep it together to ensure that the religious Shiites assume power over Iraq’s minority Sunni and Kurd populations through elections.
The Supreme Council’s defection came a day after a senior Shiite politician, Kassim Daoud, called for al-Jaafari to step down.
Daoud’s name has been mentioned as a possible replacement for al-Jaafari, as has that of Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, a deputy in the Supreme Council. Abdul Mahdi lost to al-Jaafari by one vote in last month’s balloting. Al-Hakim and Abdul Mahdi were among the dozen Iraqi leaders who met with Rice and Straw on Sunday.