Iraq Stepping Up Actions Against Chalabi's Party

WASHINGTON - With elections in Iraq two months away, the interim government has stepped up its campaign against the Iraqi National Congress, led by one of the country's leading political figures, Ahmad Chalabi.

Armed men from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, along with American contractors, raided three Baghdad offices of Mr. Chalabi's political party Thursday, the group said. The Chalabi organization accused the raiders of roughing up the buildings' guards and seizing property of the one-time exile group, which until May received a monthly stipend from the Pentagon for joint intelligence work.

"The Iraqi government forces should be fighting terrorists and Baathists. They have raided the INC offices and treated INC members in a very improper way and even beaten some of them," the spokesman for the organization, Entifadh Qanbar, told The New York Sun yesterday in a telephone interview from Baghdad.

The three buildings seized by the Iraqi security forces were once the property of the regime under Saddam Hussein, including a yacht club that was owned by Mr. Hussein's slain son Uday and a home in Baghdad's Korrada neighborhood that also was owned by Saddam Hussein's family.

Mr. Qanbar said the Chalabi group had applications pending with the interim government to take ownership of the buildings, which it has occupied since the fall of the regime. Now, most of the buildings seized by Mr. Chalabi's men during Operation Iraqi Freedom have been taken by the government. One is the Hunting Club, where the group held most of its press conferences after the fall of Mr. Hussein. Other properties belonging to the former regime and now occupied by other political parties have not been seized.

Last week's clashes with government forces were not the first for Mr. Chalabi's organization. On May 20, Iraqi police and armed American contractors raided Mr. Chalabi's headquarters in the Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad, seizing his computers, smashing framed photographs, and even confiscating his family's Koran.

That raid was ostensibly ordered by Judge Zuhair al-Maliky of Iraq's central criminal court, in light of charges that Mr. Chalabi and his associates were complicit in strong-arming officials of Iraq's treasury. Mr. Maliky formally brought in August and then dropped murder charges against Mr. Chalabi's nephew Salim Chalabi, who briefly served as a legal adviser to Prime Minister Allawi and was later appointed chief executive of the court that is supposed to try Mr. Hussein. The charges against Ahmad and Salim Chalabi have since been dropped, and Mr. al-Maliky has since been reassigned to a lower court.

An English-language press release that the Iraqi National Congress sent out Saturday said the CIA participated in the raids. The Arabic version made no mention of the American spy agency. Mr. Qanbar would not discuss the CIA's possible involvement in the raids, and an agency spokeswoman also offered no comment yesterday in response to the initial press release.

Even if CIA officers had no direct involvement in the raids last week, the agency, according to two administration officials who asked to remain anonymous, is responsible for training members of Iraq's Interior Ministry in Jordan and maintains senior advisers in the ministry.

Interior Minister Nakib is a former Sunni expatriate who lived in Damascus before returning to Iraq. His father was an original member of the Chalabi organization but was courted by the State Department through his sons in 2002, as leader of a Sunni exile organization,to oppose Mr.Hussein before the invasion.In May 2002,the State Department granted the Nakib organization a small grant, in part to establish relations with regional Arab governments.

In May, the CIA was assigned to execute an order from the National Security Council to "marginalize" Mr. Chalabi, who ended up with no ministry in the Allawi government.At the time, the National Security Agency presented evidence to the White House that it said proved Mr. Chalabi had told a contact from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in Iraq that America had cracked a secret Iranian military code, effectively burning the intelligence penetration. Mr. Chalabi denied the charges when they were made public and offered to appear before the American Congress to refute them.

Since June, Mr. Chalabi has formed the Shiite Political Council, a coalition of largely religious parties that includes the party of Muqtada al-Sadr, the fiery cleric whose militia fought American troops this summer in the streets of the holy city of Najaf and later the neighborhood in Baghdad named for his grandfather, Sadr City.

The Shiite political bloc intends to run a slate of candidates in elections scheduled for January and has already received the blessings of the foremost religious authority for the Shiites, Ayatollah al-Sistani. Because Shiites make up approximately two-thirds of the Iraqi population, Mr. Chalabi's political bloc is seen as the prohibitive favorite for the elections. Mr. Chalabi met this weekend with Sunni and Kurdish political leaders in northern Iraq, according to Mr. Qanbar, to discuss the elections, which are being boycotted for now by the largest Sunni parties.

According to Mr.Qanbar, Mr.Chalabi told those assembled, "To say all Sunnis are Baathists is not fair, to say that the only way to rule Iraq is for the Sunnis to be on top is not going to happen either, to say that every Sunni wants to be outside the political process is also wrong. If you claim security is bad and that's why we should postpone the elections, why don't you focus on what will happen if you don't have elections? Remember, we have been fighting for elections for more than a decade."

Iraq's transitional assembly yesterday voted to postpone the Iraqi election until January 30 due to escalating tensions in the largely Sunni areas of the country. Shortly after the American presidential election, Prime Minister Allawi announced the beginning of an offensive on Fallujah, a terrorist sanctuary. Last week,clashes broke out in Mosul.In a related development, the organization of 19 major international creditors known as the Paris Club, agreed to forgive 80% of the $42 billion in debt accumulated under the rule of Mr. Hussein.The Iraqi finance minister, Abdul-Mahdi, hailed the move as a "historic agreement."

[Separately, it is increasingly likely coalition forces will need a further increase in combat forces to put down remaining areas of resistance in the country, American military commanders said, according to the Washington Post.]