Talabani points the finger at the Iraqi Daawa party (Updated in the notes)

The Association of Muslim Scholars of Iraq issued a short statement on the Janaja affair, as follows:

The media have published the criticism, by the Prime Minister of the present government Nuri al-Maliki, of the airlift operation carried out by the American forces at dawn Friday in Janaja...which involved the killing of one of the guards, and the arrest of another at the home of [the Prime Minister's] sister.

What is noteworthy in this is the speed with which the government has criticized and condemned this incident, at the same time that it remains committed to silence respecting all of the other crimes that have been committed and continue to be committed by the occupation in every corner of the land of the two rivers. In fact we find this government and its bodyguards have an attitude of support for all of the crimes of the occupation, and for its plans.

AMSI records its condemnation of this particular crime, but this case is the same as the case of all of the other crimes, and we call attention to the need to avoid ambiguity in our dealings, and to avoid selectivity [in what we criticize], because this only fosters differences within [our] single people.

And the Iraqi people keeps in mind that the occupation is drawing to a close, and that what will remain is only what is authentic.

________________

For this section, see also the notes.

President Jalal Talabani made remarks on AlHurra TV which, although they apparently didn't relate overtly to the Janaja incident, nevertheless the Sadrist news-site Nahrainnet found them to be peculiar in Talabani's references to the Iraqi Daawa Party (which as everyone knows is Maliki's party). Here is how Nahrainnet presented the remarks:

Talabani, in his second expression of solidarity with the United States against the call by Nasrullah for Iraqis to support the resistance as the only way to get rid of the occupation, again criticized this call, and said, in an interview with AlHurra TV, which is financed by the American congress...that "many of the leaders of Hizbullah have long-standing relationships with Iraq", giving it as his opinion that "the Iraqi Dawa party is really responsible for the spread of the Islamic call (daawa) in Lebanon, to the point that some of the leaders of Hizbullah were members of it (members of the Iraqi Daawa party).

President Talabani was wrong about this, because Hizbullah drew its jihadi school from the Iranian revolution; the Daawa party has no connection with the spread of the Islamic call or of the Islamic movement in Lebanon; and there is not the slightest evidence for that. [Not only that, but] the Daawa party was one of the group of parties that agreed to cooperate with the occupation [in Iraq] in its secular political operations, when the government was acting to liquidate the jihadi line, which was embodied in a number of provinces by the Mahdi Army, [at a time when there weren't yet US-sponsored Awakenings].

I don't know if there is an AlHurra transcript of this interview (there is: see the notes), but as far as this Nahrainnet summary is concerned, there doesn't appear to have been any specific trigger for Talabani to be zeroing in on the Iraqi Daawa party like this, right on the heels of the Janaja incident.

(For comic relief, the Nahrainnet writer notes that Talabani criticizes Nasrullah for having assumed that the United States is interested in a permanent occupation of Iraq, when in fact there is a strong movement in the United States for the withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq. Talabani added he would like the Lebanese to communicate with him via Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, with whom he has a good relationship).

And Talabani also said this:

Undertaking to call us to resistance will be interpreted wrongly in Iraq because he who calls himself resistance does takfiir on the Shiites generally, and considers all Shiites to be rejectionists, so how can a Shiite party join its voice to this kind of criminal resistance?!!

The writer reminds us that last May US embassy officials were urged to get Iraqi government people to reply to the Nasrullah resistance call; and that Talabani has already responded to that once, so this is his second reply.