Report: US offers insurgents amnesty in secret talks

AMERICAN forces are negotiating an amnesty with Sunni insurgents in Iraq to try to defuse the nascent civil war and pave the way for disarmament of Shia militias, The Times has learnt.

The tactic marks a dramatic reversal of policy by the US military, which blocked attempts to pardon insurgents with American blood on their hands after handing over sovereignty to a secular Iraqi Government in June 2004.

The U-turn comes amid the bloodiest fighting for two years and growing domestic opposition to the war as Americans prepare to vote in crucial midterm elections.

Even as President Bush convened emergency talks with his generals and national security advisers to review strategy in Iraq, commanders on the ground were negotiating a peace deal. Observers expect leaders of the Sunni insurgency to join a peace conference early next month.

“There’s been a change in the position of the Americans,” Jabr Hadeeb Jabr, an independent Shia politician and member of the Council for Reconciliation government agency, said. “Before, they refused to give any amnesty to the people killing Americans because there was some dispute about the risk of rewarding their killers.”

Another Iraqi MP, Izzat Shabander, a member of the secular Iraqiya bloc, said: “This amnesty is coming because the American military are always pressuring the Iraqi Government to give a general amnesty to all fighters, even those who killed Iraqis.”

The proposed amnesty, which one Sunni politician said had been negotiated between the US and insurgents without involving the Government, came as a senior State Department official admitted that US policy in Iraq had been at times “stupid” and “arrogant”.

“We tried to do our best, but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in Iraq,” Alberto Fernandez, the director of public diplomacy at the department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, said. “We are open to dialogue because we all know that . . . the solution to the hell and the killings in Iraq is linked to an effective Iraqi national reconciliation.”

Read the rest at the London Times

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