Iraq fights terror with ex-terrorist Prime Minister

[Rspaight]

Man, keeping track of who's a terrorist and who's not is so hard.

Iraq's new prime minister spent years trying to topple Saddam with support of militant groups, Iranian clerics

By Antonio Castaneda, Associated Press, 4/7/2005 14:53

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) Ibrahim al-Jaafari spent more than two decades as an exile trying to topple Saddam Hussein's government with the close support of Iran and an Islamic militant group linked to terrorism.

Now, as Iraq's new interim prime minister, he has asserted he is a moderate, even as some have questioned his ties to Iran and his work for Iraq's first Shiite Islamic political party the Islamic Dawa Party of which he is spokesman.

Dawa was accused of carrying out several terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings in Baghdad and trying to blow up the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983.

Although al-Jaafari served in Dawa leadership positions, he has distanced himself from the group's attacks. But his history with the group he first joined in 1968 still raises eyebrows.

Dawa's ties to Iran, where al-Jaafari lived for nearly 10 years in exile, have also unsettled some who fear foreign influence in Iraq.

After Saddam launched a bloody crackdown on Dawa in 1980, its members received shelter and support from the Iranian government, which was ruled by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and other fundamentalist clerics who considered the United States ''The Great Satan.''

Al-Jaafari plays down his ties to Iran. In an interview with The Associated Press in February, he said suspicion over his links with Iran was a ''widespread, mistaken belief.''

''An Iraqi remains an Iraqi all his life, wherever he goes,'' he said.

Saddam targeted al-Jaafari and other Dawa members in large part for trying to spread the Islamic Shiite revolution that brought the Iranian clerics into power. Once in Iran, al-Jaafari studied Shiite theology in the Iranian holy city of Qom, but little is publicly known about the extent of his involvement if any in Dawa attacks.

''Al-Jaafari arguably was not your sort of guerrilla on the ground,'' said Vali Nasr, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. ''He was an educated doctor more of an intellectual, political figure.''

Despite his connections to militant groups and a foreign government in Tehran that remains hostile to the United Sates, U.S. authorities chose al-Jaafari in 2003 to serve in Iraq's first interim government, indicating U.S. concerns about his allegiances had subsided. Al-Jaafari lives in the U.S.-guarded Green Zone in central Baghdad.

Dawa, which is believed to have ended most terror attacks around 1990, was not a homogenous group. Some members wanted an Iranian-style government in Iraq, while others distanced themselves from Iranian leaders and said they wanted clerics involved, but not dominating government. It is not clear where al-Jaafari stood when he lived in exile.

Al-Jaafari later became a key member of the United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite-led political coalition that was overseen by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric. Al-Jaafari has close ties to al-Sistani and his wife is a distant relative of the cleric.

Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan, a member of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's coalition in parliament, tried to capitalize on the Alliance's alleged connections to Tehran before the elections, labeling the coalition the ''Iranian list'' that would install a rule of ''turbaned clerics'' if it won.

Others are concerned about al-Jaafari's positions on domestic matters. The conservative Dawa party explicitly calls for implementation of Sharia, or Islamic law.

But al-Jaafari says he supports moderate positions and women's rights, including the right for women to become president or prime minister, which conflicts with the party's platform.

''Islam should be the official religion of the country, and one of the main sources for legislation, along with other sources that do not harm Muslim sensibilities,'' al-Jaafari said in February.

Al-Jaafari, a physician, lived in Iran until 1989. He moved to Britain until the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. He was born in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, south of Baghdad, and was educated at Mosul University.