Iran Helping Religious Militias in Iraq, British Envoy Warns

Britain's most senior official in Baghdad warned yesterday that Iran was still giving "unwelcome" support to fundamentalist Shia groups in Iraq.

John Sawers, the prime minister's special envoy to Baghdad, accused Iran of backing religious militias vying for power in postwar Iraq.

"We have seen signs of and attempts to exercise undue and unwelcome influence in support of fundamentalist groupings," he said in an interview.

He said Iran was still supporting the Badr corps, the armed unit of the powerful Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The party, and much of the Badr corps, spent most of Saddam Hussein's reign in exile in Tehran. It has been ordered, like other political militias, to disarm.

"There is traffic across the border of people and goods which at the moment is very difficult to keep track of," Mr Sawers said. "But it's clearly not done with purely humanitarian intent."

Although there were some extremist Shia clerics in Iraq, few Iraqis supported an Iranian-style theocracy. "It's not in anybody's interest in this country," he said.

Mr Sawers works in an office in the vast Republican palace. Hundreds of staff in the US-led coalition provisional authority work and sleep around him in the gilded ballrooms and ante-chambers where Saddam Hussein once hosted guests.

Mr Sawers, who is still the British ambassador to Cairo, admitted there had been too few troops in Baghdad immediately after the war. But he said military planners had expected much of the Iraqi army and police force to remain intact, and that figures had since been greatly increased.

It had been a "mistake", he said, to give the US-led authority too little power at the start. Yet he added that the most difficult part of reconstruction had been to encourage Iraqis to take charge of decisions.

"The hardest part is giving Iraqis the confidence, the sense of initiative and the sense of responsibility to do things for themselves," he said.

Mr Sawers predicted that it would be at least a year before an Iraqi authority took power in the country. And he defended the US-led authority's decision to appoint a political council of around 30 Iraqis in a first step towards forming a new government.

Some parties, who wanted the council to be elected by Iraqis, have objected. But Mr Sawers said security problems, the structure of parties and the lack of a proper media meant an open political process was likely to be distorted by Ba'athists or extremist clerics.

"If you had an open political process in such an immature, unripe environment it would be open to both these extremes to exploit it," he said.

The council's decisions would "carry real weight", he said. But Paul Bremer, the US official running Iraq, has the power to overrule it. "He will only set it to one side if he has a very clear and strong reason for doing so," Mr Sawers said.

Meanwhile a constitutional convention will be held, with more than 100 Iraqi men and women, including politicians and professionals, working on a new constitution.

"Drawing up the constitution is for the Iraqis to do," he said. "We see that conference as the place where the essential political compromises of this very diverse country are going to be made."