AMMAN, JORDAN — President Bush's plan to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq has inflamed passions among the restive Sunni Arab minority, bringing new recruits to insurgent cells and outpourings of popular anger toward the U.S., the spokesman for the country's most hard-line Sunni clerical group declared Sunday.
"Iraq is like a fire," said Mohammed Bashar Faidi, spokesman for the Muslim Scholars Assn. "Instead of putting water on the fire, Bush is pouring gasoline."
The association, which says it represents thousands of clerics throughout Iraq, shares the aims of the Sunni Arab insurgency. But it also reflects the views of a significant segment of the Sunni Arab population, which has largely turned to Islamic political ideologies since the downfall of the secular Arab nationalism represented by Saddam Hussein's regime.
During a 90-minute interview in his Amman office, Faidi voiced views that illustrated the seemingly unbridgeable gulfs between Iraq's Shiite Muslim-led government, the Sunni guerrilla movement fighting it and the U.S., which in the long term hopes to draw down its troops without permitting Iraq to slip further into sectarian civil war.
Victory predicted
Faidi welcomed war, which he predicted his side would win. He advocated a step-by-step withdrawal of U.S. troops, which he said would allow armed nationalist Sunnis to rout the Iranian-linked Shiite militias and political groups that are a major component in the country's violence.
Even the prospect of a wide-scale proxy war between Iranian-backed militias and Sunni fighters aided by sympathetic Persian Gulf countries would be an improvement over the status quo, he said.
"It would be a civil war," he said. "But we believe the militias and the [current] Iraqi army [are] not fighting for an ideology or their nation but for Iran. The resistance is fighting for their nation and its beliefs. We would bring [civil war] to an end and restore order in three to four months. At the end things will be calm, better than living for four years under the American government and the Iranians."
Faidi's boss, Harith Dhari, widely considered the most influential Sunni religious figure in Iraq, has dismissed the current Iraqi government as a puppet of Iran, a largely Shiite nation. Both Muslim scholars left Baghdad for Amman months ago, in part to escape the potential wrath of Shiite militias. In November, the Iraqi government issued a warrant for Dhari's arrest on charges of collaborating with the insurgency after he made televised comments justifying its attacks.
