BAGHDAD, July 5: Iraq hinted on Wednesday it might be ready to compromise in negotiations with guerillas as officials said nearly 20 groups had expressed an interest in opening talks on certain conditions.

Minister of State for National Dialogue Akram al-Hakim said the concessions being sought by Sunni groups included a timetable for withdrawal of troops of the United States-led forces as well as the disbandment of Shia militias, and added that some were acceptable to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki.

“Around 15 to 20 groups have contacted” government officials, Mr Hakim said, although he added that it was ‘not clear how active these groups’ are on the ground.

“There are seven groups who have demanded that their resistance to the occupation forces be legitimately accepted and we said that they should identify themselves and prove that they have targeted US troops only,” the minister said.

He said the government also did not ‘refuse their condition of a timetable for withdrawal of coalition forces as there is a desire for this from everybody’.

He said the government was also looking at dismantling Shia militias but added: “That can’t be done overnight, there has to be a mechanism.”

Several Shia political parties in Iraq operate militias, whose members have been accused of carrying out revenge attacks against Sunni civilians.

The kidnappers of a Sunni woman MP who was seized with her bodyguards in Baghdad last Saturday issued demands including special protection for Shia places that strongly suggested they were Shia militiamen.

Taiseer al-Mashhadani’s captors also called for the release of detainees in US custody and a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops, Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, who is himself a Sunni, revealed on Wednesday.

“We do not have precise information about the kidnappers but we know they are a member of a group that belongs to the government and to the political process,” he charged, without specifying which of the Shia groups in the alliance that leads the government he was referring to.

But Shia radical leader Moqtada Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia took part in two uprisings against western troops in 2004, has issued similar demands.

Mr Hakim said the government was also ready to look at demands from some guerilla groups for the rehabilitation of senior officers from ousted president Saddam Hussein’s armed forces.

“It is possible to reorganise the army from top to bottom,” he said.

Mr Hakim said the government was ‘also studying the demand to cancel the de-Baathification law’, referring to a measure introduced by the US-led occupation in June 2003 that led to members of Saddam’s ruling party above a certain rank being stripped of army or government jobs.

Mr Hakim said some Sunni groups had been in contact with the authorities in Jordan, while ‘three armed groups representing former military officials are negotiating with (Iraqi President Jalal) Talabani’.

He said ‘some groups have expressed their desire through other Arab countries’ while others had approached the government through members of parliament.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is currently on a tour of the Gulf to seek regional backing for the national reconciliation plan he unveiled last month which provides for limited amnesty for certain categories of guerillas.

There have been numerous contacts between the government and guerilla groups in the past, but few have been influential enough to make a difference in the pervasive violence wracking the country.—AFP