Word: douris
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...delegation visited Damascus to discuss increased cooperation on border security. Even more promising has been the change of attitude of many former Baathists in Syria, who are broadly split into two factions: a hard-line group led by a former vice president in Saddam's government, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, and a more moderate but less powerful group led by Muhammad Younis, a former adviser to Saddam's executive council. Younis's group began reaching out to the Iraqi government in 2007, holding a conference to reevaluate the mistakes of the Saddam regime, reject their old Baathist ideology, and adopt...
...Following the August bombings in Baghdad, al-Douri's faction has also shown signs of moderating. In an interview with TIME earlier this month, the unofficial spokesman for the group, Nizar Samra'y, said it is more concerned about the growing Iranian influence on Iraq's government than in forcing U.S. troops out of the country. "We need to have a strong state in Iraq that works [toward] an Iraqi agenda not an Iranian one," he says. "We know America has an interest to return Iraq as a strong country and to stabilize the region. If America withdraws from Iraq...
...follows Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's attempt to cobble together a semblance of pan-Iraqi political solidarity. He has made an overture of reconciliation to low-level former members of the Baath Party, which ruled Iraq under Saddam Hussein. It was explicitly not offered to Ezzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam's former Vice President, who remains in hiding, nor to al-Douri's supporters. In any case, none of the Saddam loyalists has indicated they would accept al-Maliki's offer anyway. "The Baath and its men and fighters strongly reject dialogue with the collaborators, spies and traitors...
...spokesman, known only as Abu Hala, said the Ba'ath leadership under Saddam's deputy, Izzat al-Douri, were "more than willing to work with Allawi, because we see him as a nationalist and Iraqi patriot, and not a sectarian figure." He said the party didn't agree with all of Allawi's policies when he headed a transitional Iraqi government in 2004, but "we have no doubt that he would represent the interests of Iraq, not of Shi'ites or Sunnis or any other group...
...Douri also claimed to have sent President Bush a letter, "via a friend in the official Arab circles," after the December 2003 capture of Saddam. In it, al-Douri says he warned Bush that the continued presence of U.S. troops in Iraq would turn the country "into a world center for terrorism and the manufacture and export of terrorism in its many different forms." Al-Douri said he wrote Bush: "I know that you are courageous, and courage calls for a decision to withdraw immediately from Iraq...