By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA
The Associated Press
Friday, December 1, 2006; 4:39 PM
AMMAN, Jordan -- Powerful Iraqi Shiite politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, headed to the White House next week, made a gesture of reconciliation to Jordan's Sunni Arabs on Friday by praying with them and saying he opposes sectarian killings and the creation of an Iraqi Shiite state loyal to Iran.
The reassurance came two days after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, also a Shiite, snubbed Jordan's King Abdullah II, a Sunni, by canceling a three-way meeting with President Bush.
Abdullah alarmed many Iraqis in 2004 by warning of an Iranian-inspired Shiite "crescent" across the region.
A comment attributed to al-Hakim, a key power broker, also raised sectarian tensions this week. Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera, the Arab world's dominant satellite news channels, quoted him as saying that Iraq's Sunni Arab minority would be the biggest losers if civil war broke out in the country. Al-Hakim quickly denied he had made such a comment and said every Iraqi would lose in a civil war.
"We denounce and reject sectarian killings," al-Hakim, whose party runs a feared Shiite militia backed by Iran, told worshippers after Friday prayers at King Hussein mosque in the Jordanian capital, Amman. "We don't want a Shiite state that sidelines Sunnis or a Sunni state that sidelines Shiites."
Al-Hakim, a mid-ranking cleric, did not lead the prayers, joining the ritual from behind a Sunni imam. No high-level Iraqi Sunnis were in attendance.
Al-Hakim is leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, the largest party in al-Maliki's governing coalition. He is a rival of al-Maliki, and many consider al-Hakim an even more powerful political figure because of his party's electoral strength among Shiites and its Badr Brigade militia.
In a sign of his importance, Bush will meet with al-Hakim in Washington on Monday in a bid to find a new approach in Iraq, said National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe. "President Bush looks forward to an exchange of views and a discussion of important issues facing Iraq today," Johndroe said.
Al-Hakim's SCIRI runs a militia, the Badr Brigade, that is widely blamed for some of the sectarian killings that have been tearing Iraq apart since the bombing of a major Shiite shrine north of Baghdad in February.
Al-Hakim repeatedly has denied the involvement of the Badr Brigade in the violence, arguing the militia has been turned into a political organization. Before succeeding his slain brother as leader of SCIRI, al-Hakim was in charge of Badr, which was trained and armed by Iran's Revolutionary Guard and fought on the side of Iran in its eight-year war against Saddam Hussein's army in the 1980s.
The empowerment of Iraq's Shiites following the ouster of Saddam's Sunni-led regime in 2003 has been a source of alarm to many governments in the overwhelmingly Sunni Arab world and sparked fear of Iran's growing influence in the region.
SCIRI was founded in Shiite Iran in the early 1980s by al-Hakim's brother, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, who was killed in a bombing in August 2003.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a Sunni Arab leader and a close ally of the United States, further stoked these fears when he told an interviewer this year that the Arab world's Shiites were more loyal to Iran than their own nations.
Al-Hakim sought to rebuff such notions in his brief address to the worshippers in Amman.
"Iraq will never break away from the Arab fold," he said. Iraq's Shiites, he continued, are being subjected to a "genocide" led by militants, "Saddamists" and al-Qaida in Iraq, the country's most feared terror group. He did not directly refer to the Sunnis.
"We call on all Muslims to help keep Iraq unified."