IRAQ’S Prime Minister said yesterday that he had had talks with those trying to overthrow his interim administration, in an effort to defuse the bloody uprising in the Sunni heartlands.

“I have been talking to (Sunni leaders) both inside and outside the country, including some on the periphery of the so-called resistance,” Iyad Allawi said in his heavily guarded compound in Baghdad. “We have entered the phase where we could see a distinction between the terrorists and the insurgents, and we hope this will be the beginning of a divide which would help in bringing an end to this problematic area.”

Iraqi guerrillas have spoken of an increasing rift with the foreign Muslim fighters and terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda behind indiscriminate car bombings that have killed hundreds of civilians. Some Iraqi rebels say the foreigners are so well funded and organised that they cannot stand up to them.

The divisions appeared to have been glossed over when terrorists and insurgents united to battle US forces invading the rebel stronghold of Fallujah last Month but, Dr Allawi said, since then new cracks had become evident from the testimonies of interrogated prisoners.

Dr Allawi, a secular Shia, has headed Iraq’s interim Government since June, his main task being to bring the country to its first free elections, next month. Two car-bomb attacks in Shia cities on Sunday killed more than 60 people.

“The most important point is that we are seeing a line of division between insurgency and terrorism and this is something we have to work on to weaken them further,” he said.

Dr Allawi, who is standing in January’s elections, said he was well placed to understand the mindset of guerrillas and remnants of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party: as a young medical student, he participated in the 1968 Baathist coup that later paved the way for Saddam’s own power grab. He later split with the regime.

Dr Allawi’s talks with the guerrillas showed they were not very clear on what they wanted, he said. Some just wanted US troops to leave; others were disenfranchised because they had been turfed out of their jobs in the US authority’s “de-Baathification” after the invasion.

“They think they have been deprived of power; they think they have been classified as Baathists and accordingly can’t be employed or resume normal life,” Dr Allawi said, adding that he was trying to ease those who had not committed crimes back into civilian life.

Times Recommends

• Mandela’s tribe threatens President Zuma
• The French empire strikes back
• Wife of cheating governor exacts a political revenge