June 7, 2002

Representatives of four Iraqi groups who have been laying the groundwork for an opposition conference will hold talks in Washington with US officials beginning on Friday, said an official from one of the groups. But the idea is for the proposed conference to be organized and funded by the Iraqi opposition, not by the United States, Hamed al-Bayati told AFP by telephone from Washington. 

Bayati, London representative of the Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), the main Shiite Muslim opposition faction, said he and other opposition figures would meet with US officials while in Washington to attend a seminar on Iraq's Kurds. 

The "group of four," as they have come to be known, includes the National Accord Movement and the two main Kurdish groups sharing control of northern Iraq -- the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) -- in addition to SAIRI. 

But these talks exclude the controversial Iraqi National Congress (INC), a so-called umbrella opposition group that has rocky relations with the US State Department. 

Officials from the four groups will meet with Under Secretary for Political Affairs Marc Grossman on Friday and with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Ryan Crocker on Monday, according to Bayati. 

Bayati said a number of European countries had expressed readiness to host a proposed opposition conference, but added that it was premature to identify these countries or give a date for the meeting. 

The conference would bring together the four groups and "all other (opposition) forces influential and active inside Iraq" to discuss the role of the Iraqi opposition and the country's future, he said. 

It has still not been decided whether the United States and other outside parties would attend such a conference, Bayati said. 

An Iraqi dissident, Ghassan al-Atiyyah, told AFP on Tuesday the group of four's effort follows the indefinite postponement of a US-sponsored opposition conference, which had been expected to be held in late June or early July, due to disputes within the US administration over the role of the INC. 

The conference will be replaced by meetings of "specialized working groups" to be held in Europe in the summer, under the sponsorship of both the US State Department and NGOs, "in the hope that they will culminate in a political conference" in late summer, Atiyyah said. 

The State Department, however, said Tuesday it was still preparing for "a broad-based conference of Iraqis to discuss the future of Iraq after Saddam Hussein." 

Bayati told AFP he could not say at this point whether the INC would have a part in the conference the "group of four" are trying to organize, but he denied that the quartet was posing as an "alternative" to the INC. 

Bayati, whose Iran-based group has been opposed to US intervention, said that SAIRI continues to believe that change in Iraq should "come from within Iraq," albeit with the United Nations "providing protection" for the Iraqi people "on the basis of UN resolutions." 
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