Shiite leader to meet Jordan's king in flurry of Iraq-related diplomacy
NU Online · Rabu, 29 November 2006 | 11:03 WIB
Amman, NU Online
Iraq’s most senior Shiite politician was heading to Jordan Wednesday for talks with King Abdullah II, hours ahead of key meetings between the Jordanian monarch, U.S. President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Ridha Jawad Taqi, a senior aide to Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said the Shiite politician was scheduled to meet King Abdullah later
Wednesday.
It was not immediately clear whether al-Hakim would meet Bush during his two-day in Amman, but the previously unannounced visit by the powerful Shiite politician to Jordan comes amid a flurry of top level diplomacy in the region to find ways to end the violence in
Iraq.
Bush arrives in Amman Wednesday for two days of talks with Abdullah and al-Maliki.
King Abdullah met earlier this week in Amman with Harith al-Dhari, head of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars, a militant Sunni Arab group known to have links to some factions within Iraq’s three-year-old, Sunni-led insurgency.
Al-Dhari is a harsh critic of Iraq’s Shiite-led government and is wanted for questioning in Baghdad over charges that he was inciting sectarian strife.
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was in Saudi Arabia Saturday for talks with leaders of the oil-rich kingdom which many in Washington hope could be talked into using its leverage as a major Sunni powerhouse to persuade Iraq’s insurgents to lay down their arms.
Iraq’s Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, is in Tehran where he asked for the help of the mostly Shiite, clergy-ruled Iran in ending his country’s widening sectarian violence.
Al-Hakim, whose party runs a militia suspected of involvement in sectarian killings, was last in the White House in January 2004 when he met with Bush. His party has 30 of parliament’s 275 seats and is considered to be the most influential Shiite politician in Iraq.
He also has close ties with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s top Shiite cleric. He is also known to maintain close links with Iran, where he lived in exile for some two decades before he
returned to Iraq in 2003 following the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led regime. (ap/dar)
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