Iraqi Opposition Leader Speaks

Robert Dreyfuss

The following is the transcript of a lengthy interview, slightly edited for grammar, that I conducted by telephone with Salah Mukhtar. Mukhtar, who lives in Yemen, is a former Iraqi official and diplomat who worked in the Information Ministry and who served at the United Nations and as Iraq's ambassador to India. At the time of the invasion in 2003, he was Iraq's ambassador to Vietnam. Though he does not claim to be a spokesman for the resistance in Iraq or for the Baath party, he is close to both. Here is what he had to say: Q. How strong is the Iraqi resistance? A. The armed resistance has finished all the preparations to control power in Iraq. The middle class collaborators with the United States have started the leave Iraq already. Most of them are outside Iraq: Ahmed Chalabi, Iyad Allawi and others. A second wave of agents are preparing to leave, and some have already left, to Jordan, to Syria, to Britain, and some other places, because the strategic conflict, practically speaking, has reached the point of putting an end to the occupation. The resistance is controlling Baghdad now...

continua / continued