Iraq PM to present reconciliation plan

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was expected to present a national reconciliation plan to parliament today aimed at defusing the Sunni insurgency and tackling sectarian violence, political sources said.

Sunnis in Iraq were outraged yesterday by the arrest of one of their top religious leaders in a US raid in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. The US military said he had been held in a hunt for Al-Qaeda militants but later released.

The peace plan, which could be Maliki's boldest political move yet, sets out to remove powerful militias from the streets, open a dialogue with rebels and review the status of purged members of Saddam's Baath party.

Political sources said a key element of the 28-point blueprint would be to draw rebel groups into the process of implementing hoped-for agreements on such questions as defining "terrorism".

One important question will be how far Maliki, a Shi'ite Islamist who took office on May 20, would be willing to go to bring Sunni Muslim insurgents to the negotiating table.

Hasan al-Senaid, a lawmaker in his Alliance, said Maliki would offer dialogue with groups that had not shed Iraqi blood.

But Maliki still refuses to engage Saddam loyalists or Al-Qaeda, the groups behind much of the violence.

The former exile has long been a strong defender of the sacking of Baath members from the army, a US-engineered policy that critics say bolstered the insurgency.

Former Baathists are expected to get financial compensation under the reconciliation scheme, Senaid said.

The programme also aims to tackle militias, which are seen as among the most destabilising forces in Iraq but are difficult to disband because they are tied to political parties.

Sami al-Askari, another member of Maliki's bloc, cast doubt on whether the plan would be ready for parliament today.

But he stressed that it would mark a serious effort to ease sectarian violence that exploded after the February 22 bombing of a Shi'ite Muslim shrine in the town of Samarra.

The arrest yesterday of Sheikh Jamal Abdel Karim al-Dabaan, a top mufti, or religious authority, for most of Iraq's Sunni Muslims, would have been unwelcome news for Maliki.

The Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, whose leader is one of the country's vice-presidents, condemned it and many government officials in predominantly Sunni Salahaddin province suspended work in protest, the province's deputy governor said.

The US military said it had been acting on intelligence gathered following the killing of al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a US air strike on June 7 and had not known beforehand that Dabaan's home was the target.