BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was expected to present a national reconciliation plan on Sunday to curb Iraq's sectarian killing and the Sunni insurgency that has crippled the country's post-war reconstruction.
Maliki, a Shi'ite Islamist, has vowed to crush the Sunni insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and to reconcile Shi'ites with the once-dominant Sunni Muslim minority. Their mutual distrust has deepened amid sectarian bloodletting.
Since taking office on May 20 he has sought to arrest the political drift that developed while Shi'ite, Sunni and minority Kurdish parties wrangled for months over posts in the government and allowed a dangerous security vacuum to develop.
Political sources said Maliki would present his plan to parliament on Sunday in what could be his boldest move yet.
Maliki scored a major victory when the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a U.S. air strike on June 7. But fresh violence has put pressure on him to build on that success and take the sting out of the insurgency.
Sources said the plan sets out to remove powerful militias from the streets, open a dialogue with Sunni rebels and review the status of purged members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party.
But Maliki still refuses to engage Saddam loyalists or al Qaeda, the groups behind much of the violence.
Defining Terrorism
An element of the 28-point blueprint would be to draw rebel groups into the process of implementing hoped-for agreements on questions such as defining terrorism.
But Sunni leader Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the parliament speaker, cautioned it was not a "magical solution" but an attempt to "mend the cracks" splitting apart Iraq.
"The government is committed to bring all factions to one table and to implementing a national reconciliation between them," he told al-Arabiya television at the weekend.
One important question will be just how far Maliki will go to bring Sunni Muslim insurgents to the negotiating table.
Hasan al-Senaid, a lawmaker in his Alliance, said Maliki would offer dialogue with groups that had not shed Iraqi blood.
Maliki, a former exile, has long been a strong defender of the sacking of Baath members from the army, a U.S.-engineered policy that critics say bolstered the insurgency.
Former Baathists are expected to get financial compensation under the reconciliation scheme, Senaid said.
The program also aims to tackle militias, which are seen as among the most destabilizing forces in Iraq but are difficult to disband because they are tied to political parties.
The two most powerful, the Shi'ite Badr Brigades and Mehdi Army, are the armed wings of two parties in Maliki's government.
"Militias will be disarmed and integrated into civil service jobs or the armed forces," Senaid said.
Feeds