Coalition, Saddam Opponents Move to Stabilize Baghdad

Mohammed Zubaidi, a member of the Iraqi National Congress and a close associate of the group’s leader, Ahmed Chalabi, arrived at the Palestine Hotel, where most international journalists are based, accompanied by an entourage of supporters.

“Speaking through an interpreter to reporters in the Iraqi capital, Zubaidi said he had been elected vizier, or chief, of a Baghdad executive council by people representing clerics, academics, Muslim Shi’ites and Sunnis, Christians and writers,” the Reuters news service reported.

“I want to serve the people and work for the stability of the country,” Zubaidi said.

Across town in a former presidential palace near Baghdad International Airport, General Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command, met with his top commanders and began planning the transition from full combat operations to activities designed to restore order and repair infrastructure within Iraq.

Franks said U.S. forces will still have to root out some enemy fighters, including volunteers from other Arab countries, but the major part of the war is over.

The Associated Press said Franks took a tour of the palace while smoking a cigar. AP correspondent Hans Greimel reported that Franks looked at the gilded fixtures with “obvious disgust” and said mockingly, “It’s the oil-for-palace program,” a reference to the United Nations program that allowed Iraq to sell oil for the purpose of feeding its citizens.

“There is nothing more important that we are doing right now within Iraq than providing opportunities for the Iraqi people,” Franks said on Thursday at a U.S. command center in Kuwait. “People in southern Iraq are already beginning to see the benefits and as we move through Iraq with humanitarian assistance, I think you will see it’s in every place we go.”

The Iraqi opposition leader Chalabi also visited Baghdad on Wednesday, for the first time since he left for exile in the 1950’s.

The Iraqi National Congress is an ethnic and religious mix of Sunnis, Shias, Kurds and Christians that maintained prewar headquarters in Salahuddin in northern Iraq and London.

U.S. military forces flew Chalabi, a former banker who fled Iraq in 1958, and some 700 Iraqi opposition fighters to southern Iraq during the first week of April to help unify Shia opposition and aid U.S. efforts to combat pockets of resistance. Chalabi has said he does not want to head a provisional government, but does claim to be the chairman of a coalition of Iraqi groups known as the Iraqi Leadership Council.

It is unclear what role Chalabi or the Iraqi Leadership Council may have had in Zubaidi’s announcement that he was elected the head of the purported new governing body in Baghdad.

Even as Iraqis were forming possible governing councils for the capital, coalition forces continued to work to restore critical services to Baghdad.

Major General James Mattis told Reuters that electricity would be restored to some of the city by Friday.

“We expect to get the power back on by tomorrow,” Mattis said, stressing that U.S. troops were working with Iraqis to restore an array of other programs.

“Getting the water, the power, the trash back up, that’s absolutely critical,” he said.