ARABS-UN - June 4 - Brahimi Says Job In Iraq Completed.

UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi says he considers his job in Iraq completed with the June 1 formation of an interim government and choice of president and two deputies - with the IGC dissolved - and will not play the leading role in organising the planned national conference (see Iraq). As special adviser to UN Sec-Gen Annan, he says his mandate was to assist in the selection of a caretaker government, adding: "I had made it abundantly clear I would not be involved after the end of June". Instead, he says, a committee has been set up to prepare for the conference. (Diplomats expect it to be headed by Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main Kurdish parties. Brahimi has been insisting that military means alone will not solve the insurgencies in Iraq. As part of his attempts to forge a political solution, the UN envoy had sought to include opposition groups in the government itself). Brahimi says the national conference due to meet this month and expected to select a national council could include followers of Muqtada Al Sadr (a thuggish Shiite mullah implicated in the April 2003 murder of moderate Shiite theologian Abdel Majid Al-Khoui and now wants to establish a Shiite theocracy in Iraq), and other national opposition groups. (New political movements have been emerging to call for the immediate withdrawal of US and other foreign troops. Brahimi, an pan-Arab nationalist with Islamist leanings, says such groups should be included in the post-June government. Unless co-opted into the new government structures, he warns, they could provide legitimacy to the violent insurgencies). Brahimi says: "I don't think we've been able to bring into the government people who are part of that constituency. We tried to look around and see if we could have people who could have been a bridge. But there is enough in the government to move in that direction. This national conference should be used to make certain others are offered a chance to be under the tent".