Jaafari to submit 6 nominees for Cabinet posts

BAGHDAD -- Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced yesterday that he had filled six vacancies in his new Cabinet, including the sensitive post of defense minister, whose first task will be to confront insurgent violence.

Jaafari declined to name his nominees, but members of the premier's Shi'ite-dominated alliance said Saadoun al-Duleimi, a Sunni Muslim and former security police official who defected from Iraq in 1991, would be defense minister.

At a news conference, Jaafari said that he had completed his Cabinet, most of whose members were sworn in Tuesday, and would present the nominees to the National Assembly for approval today. He said the three-man Presidency Council had already approved his choices.

In addition to the defense position, Sunnis will fill a deputy premiership and head the ministries of human rights and industry in an effort to form a government that includes Iraq's major ethnic and religious groups. In his customary indirect manner, however, Jaafari did not mention Sunnis in his announcement, saying instead that ''in general, the Cabinet includes new groups of Iraqis I think weren't in the former Cabinet."

Other politicians said the minister of oil will be Muhammed Bahr Uloum, a Shi'ite who held the same post in the US-appointed Governing Council.

Jaafari said he hoped to appoint a woman as a fourth deputy prime minister, but that decision had not been finalized.

The choice of Duleimi followed more than a week of byzantine negotiations between Jaafari's Shi'ite coalition and several groups of Sunnis that sometimes compete with one another. Many nominees proposed by Sunnis for defense minister were rejected by Shi'ite or Kurdish leaders because they were seen as having close ties with the Ba'ath Party of ousted president Saddam Hussein.

Trained as a sociologist, Duleimi headed the Center of Socio-Psychological and Security Studies in Iraq before he defected. He returned to Iraq after Hussein was ousted and opened the nonpartisan Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies in Baghdad.

In a 2003 interview with the Boston Globe, Duleimi said he opposed the US occupation authority's decision to dissolve the Iraqi army, saying it was needed to help maintain order, although he disliked Hussein's military forces.

''I hate these people," he said, adding that his mother had died in an Iraqi prison during the Hussein era. Duleimi could not be reached for comment, but an aide confirmed in a telephone interview that he was offered the defense post and was willing to accept it.

Also yesterday, an organization of Sunni clerics disclosed that the bodies of 14 blindfolded men discovered Friday in a landfill in northern Baghdad were Sunni Muslims from the town of Madain, where Sunni-Shi'ite tensions have been high in recent months.