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Amnesty To Exclude Killers of GIs, Iraqis
Detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison yard wait to be released. Another 500 detainees were released as part of a national reconciliation plan that aims to release 2,500 prisoners this month.
(By Ali Jasim-pool -- Getty Images)
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The Mujaheddin al-Shura Council, an umbrella group of insurgents including al-Qaeda in Iraq, derided the reconciliation plan in an online statement, saying that "there will be no reconciliation with the apostates, nor will our swords be put in their sheaths."
A member of the Islamic Army of Iraq, an insurgent group, said this week that violent attacks would continue until all American troops left Iraq.
Adnan Thiyab al-Jubouri, a Sunni member of parliament, has already decided negotiations with insurgents are over.
"We worked hard trying to make one of the resistance armed groups accept the reconciliation project but we failed," he said. "We've been in direct contact with most of them, except al-Qaeda. They said it is impossible for the Iraqi armed resistance to stop. They insist that this is their right to get rid of the occupation."
Another Sunni in parliament, Hussein Shukr al-Falluji, said it is too soon to say whether insurgent groups will embrace Maliki's proposal but described the reconciliation plan as "born crippled."
"This thing is not as easy as some people have said. I think it follows an American ideology, not an Iraqi one," he said. "If it is not agreed that the foreign forces in Iraq are occupiers and the people fighting them are resistance, then there is no way of thinking of reconciliation, never."
The violence targeted by the government's olive branch has shown no sign of abating. Bombings killed scores of Iraqis over the past two days, including a suicide car bomb that exploded Tuesday at a gas station in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing at least three people and wounding 14.
Also Tuesday, the Iraqi tribunal prosecuting Hussein for crimes against humanity said a second trial, in the killings of tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds in 1988, will begin on Aug. 21. Hussein and six of his aides, including Ali Hassan al-Majeed, known as "Chemical Ali" for his alleged use of chemical weapons against the Kurds, will be tried.
Prosecutors have recommended the death penalty for Hussein in the first trial, on charges of ordering the killing of 148 Shiites from the village of Dujail after an assassination attempt against him there in 1982.
Special correspondents K.I. Ibrahim in Baghdad and Muhanned Saif Aldin in Tikrit and other Washington Post staff contributed to this report.
