Raid on Top Sunni Official Adds to Iraqi Internal Feuding

06/27/2007

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
NY Times
Published: June 27, 2007


BAGHDAD, June 26 — Iraqi forces raided the home of Culture Minister Asad al-Hashimi early Tuesday after an arrest warrant accused him of masterminding the 2005 attempted assassination of Mithal al-Alusi, now a member of Parliament who was once a top aide to Ahmad Chalabi.

The raid represented the latest difficulty in efforts to reconcile the dominant Shiite and Kurdish factions, who control the government, with Sunni politicians like Mr. Hashimi who say they are being marginalized and singled out. Mr. Hashimi was in hiding after the raid, and his party called the charges a trumped-up attempt to discredit a Sunni leader.

A government spokesman said the warrant was issued by an independent judge. Mr. Alusi survived the assassination attempt, but his two sons were killed.

The raid came a day after a suicide bomber entered a Baghdad hotel lobby and killed four Sunni tribal sheiks from Anbar Province who were cooperating with American forces fighting Sunni extremists.

The sheiks had recently met with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to discuss assimilating tribe members into Iraq’s security forces. The dead included a founder of the Anbar Salvation Council, and a senior member of that group said he believed that the Iraqi government might have had a hand in the attack.

On Tuesday, another Sunni tribal sheik, Hamid Abd Sarhan al-Shijiri, was assassinated in Baghdad. Twenty-five corpses were also found strewn about the capital, according to an Interior Ministry official.

Mr. Hashimi is a member of the main Sunni political bloc, the Iraqi Consensus Front. The crime he is accused of overseeing occurred in February 2005, when gunmen tried to kill Mr. Alusi, a secular Sunni who had helped lead efforts to bar former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party from serving in high offices. Mr. Alusi was driven from Mr. Chalabi’s political organization after making a public visit to Israel. Mr. Chalabi, a Shiite, was once a favorite of the Pentagon.

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