DUBAI (AFP) — Former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi said in comments aired Thursday that he had organized meetings between senior US officials and representatives of the banned Baath party of executed dictator Saddam Hussein.
Allawi said he himself had taken part in some of the meetings, which involved representatives of Saddam's fugitive number two Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, who has a 10-million-dollar US bounty on his head.
"The dialogue took place at the request of the United States," the former premier said in the comments broadcast by Dubai-based satellite channel Al-Arabiya, which promised to broadcast the full interview on Friday.
"It took place in an Arab country and partly in Iraq in my presence," Allawi said.
"The meetings were aimed at reaching a mutual understanding between the Baathists and the US government which was represented at a senior level."
Allawi gave no date for the talks but said that the Baath party, which was outlawed in June 2003 as one of the first acts of the US-led occupation, was represented by "delegates of the (party) leadership led by Al-Duri (Ibrahim)."
Ibrahim, who was Saddam's number two in the decision-making Revolutionary Command Council, is the most senior figure of the old regime still at large and has had a US bounty on his head since November 2003.
US commanders have long accused him of being the paymaster of many of the attacks on their troops, using Saddam's hidden stashes of hard currency to buy jobless Iraqis to serve as footsoldiers in the insurgency.
Thousands of US troops have taken part in the search for the fugitive leader, who was widely feared as one of the hard men of the old regime.
Ordinary Iraqis nicknamed him the iceman because he once sold blocks of ice on the streets of the main northern city of Mosul.
Allawi said that at the centre of the talks had been moves to relax the ban on former senior or middle-ranking Baathists taking up government or military jobs that has been in force since 2003.
"The discussions focussed on the question of the entry of the Baathists into the political process... in return for the repeal of the de-Baathification law," he said.
The legislation has long been seen as one of the measures that has fuelled the anti-US insurgency among the Sunni Arab former elite and moves to amend it are on the agenda for the new session of the Iraqi parliament.
Washington regards the new bill as a vital part of moves to reconcile Iraq's divided communities after 18 months of devastating sectarian conflict.
But many Shiite lawmakers are bitterly opposed to the moves to rehabilitate their erstwhile oppressors.
Allawi said that he had taken part in a series of meetings between US officials and the Baathists after successfully organising the first encounter.
He said that the meetings had taken place "in the presence of Western governments and certain Arab countries," which he did not identify.
Allawi, who served as interim prime minister from June 2004 to April 2005, has long been a fierce critic of de-Baathification.
Although he suffered an assassination attempt in London in 1978 that was widely blamed on Saddam's regime, the Iraqi National Accord group he formed in exile in 1991 included many dissident Baathists and army officers.
Allawi also enjoys longstanding links with the US Central Intelligence Agency, having formed the INA under its tutelage and organized an unsuccessful coup against Saddam five years later.
His largely secular Iraqi National List includes communists and socialists along with some Sunnis but it has been largely sidelined by the mounting sectarianism of Iraqi politics.
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