Iraq Minister Cites Threat of Hussein Loyalists

BAGHDAD, Dec. 20 -- Iraq's outgoing interior minister said Tuesday that forces loyal to former president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party posed the greatest security challenge to the next government and that their influence and capability grew while U.S. and Iraqi troops were focusing counterinsurgency efforts on foreign fighters.

The threat from groups such as al Qaeda in Iraq, led by the Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, has waned in recent months, said Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, a powerful and polarizing figure in Iraq's Shiite Muslim-dominated cabinet whose term expires early next year.

"I believe from my own sources that al Qaeda is weakening here and will be gone, in part because we have done a better job closing the border in the west. Now it's the Baathists," Jabr said in a wide-ranging interview at his office in a lavish marble palace that once belonged to one of Hussein's top lieutenants. "At first, all efforts were directed at the foreign groups. The Baathists were left alive, not chased and not hunted. They could carry on doing their thing."

The comparative strength of foreign and Iraqi forces within the broader, Sunni Arab-led insurgency here has been a matter of much debate. U.S. diplomats and military officials often stress the influence of foreigners, who they say conduct 96 percent of suicide attacks in the country. But some analysts say foreigners make up fewer than 10 percent of all fighters and that their role has been overstated in an attempt to portray the insurgency as something foisted on Iraq by outsiders.

In the past 30 days, only four foreign fighters have been captured or killed by Interior Ministry forces, Jabr said, compared with an average of up to 16 a month earlier this year.

The minister, a slight, soft-spoken civil engineer who favors stylish gray suits, also cast doubt on the hope expressed by U.S. and Iraqi officials that the participation of Sunnis in the political process would help stem the violence.

"As the election ended, the attacks went up and it was back to the old methods," he said. "Now I ask, as an observer not as the minister: Are the people who joined the political process representative of the insurgency? . . . We'll have to wait and see."

Jabr has been a lightning rod for controversy during his almost eight months in office. Iraq's Sunni Arab minority accuses the Interior Ministry of sanctioning hit squads, run by Shiite militias, that have carried out brutal executions of Sunni clerics and political leaders. In late November and early December, U.S. troops uncovered evidence of widespread torture of inmates at two Interior Ministry prisons.

"The main problem in the country is the Ministry of the Interior forces who are torturing and attacking people in Sunni regions," said Saleh Mutlak, a Sunni parliamentary candidate whose slate in last Thursday's elections included some former Baathists.

Asked about the recent allegations of torture, Jabr pulled out a copy of a report issued by Human Rights Watch that discussed the abuse of detainees under the previous government, headed by interim prime minister Ayad Allawi, who left office early this year.

"You can see things were bad even in that time. But why was there no public outcry?" he said. "I do not accept torture. Thirteen of my family members were killed by the Saddam regime. I know we have to protect human rights."

Iraq's turbulent recent history is partly to blame for occasional abusive behavior by security forces, Jabr said, adding that many of the officers who worked at the prisons being investigated had "lost brothers, sons, family members to Saddam.