BAGHDAD: The Iraqi cabinet yesterday approved a draft law that offers a general pardon to thousands of detainees held in US and Iraqi prisons in a bid to boost national reconciliation.
"The draft law offering amnesty to detainees who are innocent was approved by the cabinet and forwarded to parliament," an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki said.
Thousands of detainees, mostly Sunni Arabs, are being held in US and Iraqi prisons without formal charges. Most have been detained for more than a year on suspicion of backing insurgency.
Their detention is seen fuelling animosity between the Shi'ite and Sunni communities in Iraq and the US military in particular has been strongly advocating their release in the wake of a growing alliance of Sunnis with American forces.
"The law will cover as many number of detainees as possible" who are not found to be guilty, official said, adding that some of the detainees include those held for corruption and other financial crimes.
More than 26,000 detainees are held in two US prisons and thousands more in Iraqi-run detention centres.
On the other hand The fate of tens of thousands of US-led Sunni Arabs fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq hangs in the balance as US and Iraqi leaders debate their future and as they are increasingly targeted by the Islamists.
Since last year more than 73,000 Sunni Arabs, most of them former insurgents who fought against the Americans in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein, have allied themselves with US troops to battle Al Qaeda.
Separately, a Tunisian court yesterday jailed 10 men for up to five years for attempting to join Al Qaeda fighters in Iraq.
"Karim Elbaloumi, an architecture student, was given five years in prison and the other nine were sentenced to two years in jail," lawyer said.
He said the court convicted the men of planning to join insurgents, having military training and recruiting people to fight US-led coalition forces in Iraq.
Meanwhile, Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish guerilla targets in northern Iraq yesterday, in the fourth such cross-border raid in five days.
The military said its offensive against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party inside Turkey and across the border in northern Iraq would continue.
Eight hideouts and caves in the Zap valley occupied by the separatist PKK were hit, it added.
The White House said it had expressed concern to Ankara over the possible escalation of attacks against rebels inside northern Iraq.
"We've also made it clear to the Turkish government that anything that could lead to escalated concerns or civilian casualties; we have concerns about those steps".
Spokesman reiterated that the US regards the PKK as terrorists.
Meanwhile, US President George W Bush signed a $555 billion (BD209bn) bill yesterday that will pay for the Iraq war well into next year and keep government agencies running through September.
Bush's signature on the massive spending bill capped a long-running battle with the Democratic-run Congress and came before the president left his Maryland mountaintop retreat.
Separately, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki insisted that a 32-year-old territorial accord with Iraq remained in force, despite the Iraqi president reportedly saying it was now void.
"A regime change cannot violate treaties. The Algiers accord is an official document registered with the UN. It has the force of a law and cannot be breached," he said in Manama.
Mottaki was responding to a question over remarks made by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani on Tuesday in which he described the 1975 Algiers accord as "obsolete".
Baghdad's first major cinematic event in two years got underway yesterday with the start of four-day international film festival, screening 63 short movies with peace as the theme.
The movies will be screened until December 29, involving film-makers from Egypt, France, Denmark, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Morocco, Singapore, the Philippines, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar.
