Iraqi Shi'ites pick nominee, look for wide support

BAGHDAD -- The Shi'ite Muslim coalition that garnered the most votes in Iraq's election nominated Dr. Ibrahim Jaafari for prime minister yesterday, setting the stage for him to become leader of the new government.

Jaafari, 55, a physician who is known as a comparatively quiet and deeply religious politician, heads the religious Da'wa Party and serves as one of Iraq's two vice presidents. Of all the Shi'ite religious party leaders, he has the broadest appeal among Sunni Muslims, but he has little experience in government beyond his stint in the interim administration.

His selection as prime minister is not assured. The Shi'ite coalition commands 51 percent of the seats in the Transitional National Assembly, so the bloc needs to secure support from other parties for Jaafari to get the two-thirds approval needed for a new government.

Shi'ite political leaders say they are optimistic of gaining that support from the Kurdish coalition, which finished second in the vote; from interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's faction; and from Sunnis who largely boycotted the Jan. 30 election.

There is no formal deadline for the Transitional National Assembly to meet, although Jaafari and other leading members of the Shi'ite United Iraqi Alliance expect to conclude negotiations within two weeks. One of the assembly's first tasks will be to choose a president and two deputy presidents, who will then pick a prime minister. The assembly would then have to approve their choice by a simple majority vote. If the three are not unanimous in their recommendation, confirmation would require a two-thirds vote.

Jaafari's Da'wa Party has long advocated a religious government but says it would accommodate secular and non-Muslim Iraqis. Jaaffari promised yesterday that he would seek a government of national unity.

"We differentiate between those who boycotted the elections and those who fought the elections," he said at a news conference announcing his nomination, pledging to reach out to Sunni Arabs and all other Iraqis. "We have the responsibility to build bridges to those brothers and let them participate in the new Iraq."

Addressing one of the most contentious issues among those who opposed the election, Jaafari refused to demand a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops, saying such a step depended on the readiness of Iraqi security forces.

Elected Shi'ite leaders had been meeting since last week to settle on a nominee, and their long deliberations had prompted speculation that the alliance could fracture into splinter groups.

Until the last moment, Jaafari had been locked in a close race with Ahmed Chalabi, the one-time White House favorite. After US officials broke with Chalabi and even accused him of leaking American secrets to Iran, Chalabi repositioned himself as a central player in Shi'ite politics, emerging as a surprise top candidate for prime minister.

Chalabi said he quit the race "for the unity of the alliance" and would not say whether he had been offered a post in the new government. Another leading member of the alliance, Hussein Shahristani, said he had persuaded Chalabi to drop out by telling him that a unanimous choice was crucial.

"He realized the importance of having a unified position is more important than following ambitions," Shahristani said.

Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni leader who served on the Iraqi Governing Council with Jaafari, said that the Shi'ite leader is a moderate who makes decisions by consensus. "He's someone I think who would accept a good deal of restraint and not do anything in an extremist way," Pachachi said.

Still, Jaafari's experience as vice president since June has not done much to prepare him for the monumental challenges of overseeing the writing of a new constitution, the preparation for national elections in December, and the ongoing battle against a resilient insurgency, Pachachi said.

Jaafari will have to reach out to a Sunni population that feels marginalized by elections and is suspicious of Shi'ites, who were, along with Kurds, persecuted under Saddam Hussein -- a tall order given the heightened fears of retribution among some Sunni Arabs.

"They will kill all the Sunnis," said Ahmed Saleh al-Mash'adani, 28, a merchant in Baghdad's Aadhamiya district, where support for the insurgency runs high. "The conspiracy against the Sunnis is prepared by Iran and carried out by the Shi'ite Alliance."

Rivals -- including Allawi's allies -- have publicly accused the Shi'ite alliance of taking orders from Iran, where many Shi'ite political groups kept exile bases during Hussein's regime. Jaafari spent several years in Iran before moving to London in 1990, although he denies any links to the Tehran government.

Opponents also say the alliance takes orders from clerics in Najaf led by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is Jaafari's brother-in-law.

Shahristani said that Sistani steered clear of the selection of the alliance's prime minister candidate. "He has told us that you are elected by the people, you are answerable to the people," he said. "Our decision . . . was not dictated by any country outside of Iraq, or any group outside the alliance."

Iraqis seem to view Jaafari as more of a man of the people than other former exiles turned politicians. He is a longtime leader of the Da'wa Party, which had much more of a grass-roots presence in Iraq than its main Islamic party rival, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

His rivals, including Chalabi and Allawi, are part of the well-to-do Shi'ite elite from Baghdad's venerable Kadhimiya neighborhood; their relatives served in the government under Iraq's short-lived monarchy.

Jaafari grew up in Karbala, where his father tended the shrine of Imam Hussein and died when Jaafari, the youngest of 14 children, was 4. Jaafari studied medicine at Mosul University, a largely Sunni city in the north, where he helped mobilize people against the regime.

Jaafari lives in a mansion surrounded by a greenish moat within Baghdad's Green Zone, guarded by US Navy Seals. In keeping with his grandfatherly image, on a morning shortly before his nomination he shuffled downstairs in slippers and dishdasha -- the traditional Arab gown -- and slipped into the bathroom in full view of reporters waiting to interview him.

He stresses that his family traces its roots back to the Prophet Mohammed and goes back 500 years to a village in Saudi Arabia.

"I think politics is a very holy thing," Jaafari said recently. "I started my life in politics since childhood, and I will stay with it until I pass from this life."

In the one episode that forced many Islamic politicians to put their cards on the table, Jaafari approved a controversial law in December 2003 that briefly replaced Iraq's family law, one of the most progressive in the Arab world, with Islamic law. The measure allotted smaller shares of inheritance for women and limited women's rights in divorce proceedings.

Jaafari tried to minimize the importance of the episode, pointing that he was not present at the Iraqi Governing Council vote. Rather, his deputy cast the vote in favor of the law, which was repealed a month later when Pachachi took the helm of the Governing Council.

He refused to be pinned down on how much sway Islamic law should have over Iraq's future constitution and laws. "I think this is a parliamentary issue, and we should not have a prearranged mold," he said.

Jaafari said he welcomes the requirement that women make up 25 percent of the parliament. And he signaled that he wants a modern state and would not follow models such as Saudi Arabia, which forbids women from driving cars, or Iran, where an unelected council of clerics is the highest authority in the country.

For example, he said, his wife is a gynecologist and surgeon, and he supports her right to have such an important job.

"Many Islamic movements prevent ladies from studying and going into politics," he said. "They even regard the person who votes as unbeliever and try to kill him in the name of an Islamic movement. I cannot deal with this kind of Islam."

Jaafari vowed to do better than the interim government at solving the security problem. The government must deal more aggressively with unemployment, cross-border movement of terrorists, and what he called people of "the same mind" as Hussein. "Either we govern Iraq or we kill Iraqis; either we control Iraq or we destroy Iraq," he said.

Globe correspondents Sa'ad al-Izzi and Mohammed Qasim Shariza contributed to this report.