WASHINGTON – The Iraqi politician who was fired from his post in the de-Baathification commission for his public visit to Israel in September is starting an organization to join the Middle East’s liberal dissidents.

In an exclusive interview yesterday with The New York Sun, Mithal al-Alusi discussed his plans to launch the Association of the Free Reformers. “The majority of Iraqis do not trust the Islamists or the authoritarians. We have an opportunity now to create a new politics in Iraq,” he said.

Mr. al-Alusi, a Sunni Muslim Arab and a former member of the Baath Party, was in Washington three weeks after Baathist assassins claimed credit for killing his two sons, Ayman and Jamal. They were gunned down in Baghdad on February 7. A few days later, the Rashid branch of Saddam Hussein’s old party issued a communique claiming responsibility for the murder and vowing that its next target would be Mr. al-Alusi, who until September was the director-general of Iraq’s de-Baathification commission for press and education. Iraqi newspapers soon after began referring to him as Aba al-Shahidain, the father of the two martyrs.

This week he is making the case to the Bush administration and Congress that liberal politics in Iraq is possible and should be supported. Mr. al-Alusi has collected the names of political prisoners in Egypt, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria and will be lobbying Iraq’s Foreign Ministry to press for their release. Among his top priorities is for Egypt to drop charges against Ayman Nour, the opposition parliamentarian arrested this month in Cairo. He has also taken up the case of Fathi el-Jahmi, the Libyan human rights leader who was abducted last spring, despite numerous protests from the State Department.

“I believe it is our responsibility to ask for reform in the region, and this is not just the job from the outside, but from the inside. The state authoritarian systems must understand there is a movement of Arabs, Iranians, and Turks and others – a movement to reject regimes that do not respect human beings.”

Mr. al-Alusi added that he believes a democratic Iraq is the natural home ad dress for such a regional movement. “This is not Saddam’s time. Democratic people have to understand we are the allies of Syria’s political prisoners, Iran’s political prisoners, Libya’s political prisoners,” he said. “These regimes will make a deal with their neighbors. Let me treat people the way I want and I will give you something. We can’t have this diplomacy anymore.”

One of his more radical moves is a plan to invite one of Iran’s most potent opposition figures, Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, to Najaf, the traditional seat of the Shiite Muslim sect’s religious authority, from the holy city of Qom.

“We want to invite him to lecture in Najaf on Islamic jurisprudence and its role in state politics,” he said over brunch in downtown Washington. “It is important for more people to know his reasons why he took a stance against Vilayat e faqih,” the political system introduced by Ayatollah Khomeini that places political power in the hands of the clergy.

The move for Mr. al-Alusi is particularly risky in light of the electoral victory for the United Iraqi Alliance, which secured 140 out of the 275 seats of the transitional assembly in the January 30 elections. While the slate’s platform does not endorse clerical rule, its nominee for prime minister, Ibrahim Jafari, leads the Dawa party, which for years under Iran’s patronage endorsed the Islamic republic’s political system.

Mr. al-Alusi did not do as well in the elections. His Democratic Party of the Iraqi Nation won less than 4,290 votes, far short of the 30,000 that parties would need to place just one delegate in the new Parliament. He said many of his supporters, who hail from the Yazidi faith in the Kurdish areas near Mosul, were told there were no paper ballots when they showed up at the polls. Mr. al-Alusi is the godfather of three sons of Qasim Sheshoo, a Yazidi sheik who ran on Mr. al-Alusi’s slate. He said he became close to Mr. Sheshoo while he lived in Hamburg in exile and as part of a Yazidi ritual literally held Mr. Sheshoo’s sons in his lap while they were circumcised.

“Many people were trying to keep me out of the new Parliament. In one instance we were told that the New Sabah newspaper was asked by President al-Yawar not to run the advertisements we purchased,” he said. “I am a target of many in the government and the terrorists now.”