Sunni Factions Split With Al-Qaeda Group
Rift Further Blurs Battle Lines in Iraq
By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 14, 2007; A01

BAGHDAD, April 13 -- Key Sunni militant groups are severing their association with al-Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni group that claims allegiance to the organization led by Osama bin Laden. The split could help isolate a primary foe of the United States in Iraq but could also further splinter the Sunni insurgency and make it even harder to control, according to insurgent leaders and Iraqi and U.S. officials.

In the Sunni heartland of Anbar and other provinces, Sunni groups are accusing al-Qaeda in Iraq of killing, kidnapping and torturing dozens of their fighters, clerics and followers. One leading Sunni extremist organization, the Islamic Army, says al-Qaeda has killed more than 30 fighters from different armed factions in recent weeks.

Last weekend, the Islamic Army posted on insurgent Web sites a nine-page letter urging bin Laden to stop those killing in his name. "He should rise up for his faith and assume religious and organizational responsibility for al-Qaeda and search for the truth," the letter said. "It is not enough to disown those actions, but it is imperative to correct the path."

The Sunni insurgency in Iraq has long been fractious, in part because secular nationalists, tribal leaders and former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and army have rejected al-Qaeda's tactics, particularly beheadings. But the emerging rift represents the Sunni groups' most decisive effort since the 2003 invasion to distance themselves from al-Qaeda in Iraq.

"They have realized that those people are not working for Iraq's interests," said Alaa Makki, a Sunni member of parliament with close ties to the insurgents. "They realized that their operations might destroy Iraq altogether."

The emerging confrontation between the Sunni groups and al-Qaeda in Iraq is the latest addition to a dizzying mosaic of battle lines. U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces are fighting al-Qaeda fighters, Sunni groups and Shiite militias. Shiite militias are combating Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda. In the south, the Shiite militias fight each other for control. In the west, Sunni tribal leaders are suspicious of Sunni parties inside the government. And in the north, tensions are rising between the Kurds and neighboring Turkey. Oil-rich Kirkuk itself is a flash point as Arabs and Turkmens clash with the Kurds over the city's future.

Insurgent leaders, in interviews in person or by telephone, offered different explanations for their split. Many said their link to the al-Qaeda groups was tainting their image as a nationalist resistance force. Others said they no longer wanted to be tools of the foreign fighters who lead al-Qaeda. Their war, they insist, is against only the U.S. forces, to pressure them to depart Iraq.

"We do not want to kill the Sunni people nor displace the innocent Shia, and what the al-Qaeda organization is doing is contradictory to Islam," said Abu Marwan, a religious leader of the Mujaheddin Army in Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad. "We will strike whoever violates the boundaries of God, whether al-Qaeda or the Americans."

What the split means for the United States and its efforts to pacify Iraq remains unknown. On one hand, al-Qaeda in Iraq appears to be losing legitimacy and support. But it remains a potent, well-financed force, attracting fighters from Afghanistan to Morocco as well as growing numbers of Iraqis, say U.S. military officials and analysts. In some areas, Sunni insurgents are still partnering with al-Qaeda. And as long as the Sunni groups remain fragmented and politically alienated, the prospects for stability are slim.

In recent months, U.S. military commanders have sought to take advantage of the rift. Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar are now working with U.S. troops to fight al-Qaeda. Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the U.S. ambassador here until last month, and Iraqi government officials said they have had talks with some insurgent groups in an attempt to isolate al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The Islamic State of Iraq, a Sunni umbrella organization said to have been created by the group al-Qaeda in Iraq, has said it would kill any Sunni suspected of being an agent of the United States or the Iraqi government, according to Islamic State spokesman Abu Hasnah al-Dulaimi.

"Those armed groups have no choice," Dulaimi said in a telephone interview from Anbar's provincial capital, Ramadi. "They have to either join us in forming the Islamic State project in the Sunni areas or hand over their weapons to us before we are forced to act against them forcefully. It will not save them that they have fought the Americans and resisted them in the last few years."

He said his group would act against Sunnis "before they sit down at the negotiating table with the Americans, because we have warned them before."

"Al-Qaeda has killed more Iraqi Sunnis in Anbar province during the past month than the soldiers of the American occupation have killed within three months. People are tired of the torture," said Abu Mohammad al-Salmani, an Islamic Army commander, who said the group had written the letter to bin Laden. "We cannot keep silent anymore."

The letter accuses the al-Qaeda group of "killing innocent people with gases like chlorine," referring to recent chlorine bomb attacks in Baghdad and Anbar. It acknowledged that its leaders were killed because "they expressed their willingness to negotiate with the Americans for their exit from Iraq." In some areas, it said, the al-Qaeda fighters were imposing "Taliban-like" Islamic codes, referring to edicts by the strict former rulers of Afghanistan. By opening a front against the Shiites, the letter said, "the only losers will be the Sunnis who have nothing to do with al-Qaeda."

Khalid Awad, a commander of the Jamiat Brigades, another insurgent group in Anbar, said: "We must confess that if it was not for al-Qaeda, neither Iraq nor Afghanistan would have been occupied. For al-Qaeda has awakened the American ogre against the Islamic nation after the September 11th events, and it is still causing disasters."

About three months ago, al-Qaeda fighters began targeting insurgent leaders. Gunfights have taken place in Baghdad neighborhoods such as Abu Ghraib and northern cities such as Taji. In Diyala province, al-Qaeda killed or kidnapped several Sunni insurgent leaders and religious and academic figures, dumping at least one of the bodies into a river in recent weeks, police officials said.

Now, local insurgent groups have united to fight them, erecting checkpoints and patrolling Baqubah and nearby towns, said Abu Jasim, a leader of the Mujaheddin Army. More than 100 al-Qaeda fighters were captured in the towns of Buhriz and Tahrir, the core areas controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq in Diyala, he said.

"Frankly speaking, we don't want an inner Sunni-Sunni fight, and we do not want to have a military collision with al-Qaeda, like what the tribes did, although we have all the right to do so," said Salmani, the Islamic Army commander, referring to the decision of tribal leaders in Anbar to side with the Americans.

But the pressure from al-Qaeda fighters is growing. They have posted statements in mosques and on the Web warning that they will target any Sunni group that defies them. On March 27, they allegedly killed the nephew of Harith al-Dari, the most prominent Sunni cleric in Iraq. The nephew was a senior leader in the 1920 Revolution Brigades, police officials said.

On Monday, gunmen killed an Islamic Army leader south of Samarra, said Capt. Zuhair al-Badri in Samarra. The previous night, two other fighters were killed. Islamic Army leaders immediately blamed al-Qaeda, saying the attack was in retaliation for the letter to bin Laden.

Many of the insurgent groups, however, are reluctant to unite. Abu Aja Naemi, a commander of the 1920 Revolution Brigades based in Duluiyah, north of Baghdad, recalled a meeting among various groups to discuss forming an umbrella organization. The idea fell through, he said, over concerns about turf.

"Every commander of an organization said, 'I have my own method that I am following, and so I am going to follow it,' " said Naemi, who said his fighters have clashed with al-Qaeda in several cities, including Haditha and Husaybah. "If there is greater organization, they worry that in the future they will lose power in their areas. So they work separately."

His own group has splintered in recent weeks, leading to the emergence of a faction of mostly Palestinian fighters calling itself Hamas, after the radical Palestinian organization. Naemi said that for now, the new group was still allied with the 1920 Revolution Brigades and serving as part of its military wing.

The Sunni groups are also divided over entering the political process, said Makki, the member of parliament. His Iraqi Islamic Party is serving as a liaison between the Shiite-led government and the Sunni insurgents, including, he said, the Islamic Army, the 1920 Revolution Brigades and other main groups.

"But mind you, not all of the subgroups of those groups are willing to go in this direction. They are still not convinced about negotiations," Makki said.

Hasan Suneid, a Shiite member of parliament and close aide of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, described another major stumbling block. The insurgents, he said, are "trying to negotiate demands that are strategic to their interests." They want a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals, a revision of the Iraqi constitution and a balance of Shiites and Sunnis in government ministries.

"If they maintain their independence from each other and each one has its different strategy, there will be chaos on the ground and chaos at the [negotiating] table," said Tariq al-Hashimi, the Sunni vice president and leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party.

Saleh al-Mutlaq, another Sunni member of parliament with close links to the insurgent groups, said many were not serious about talking with the government. "They would prefer to talk directly to the Americans," he said. "They don't trust the government. They don't want to see that they are strengthening the government. That's why they want to redraw the political process from the beginning.

"If they do not unite, they will be weakened," Mutlaq said. "Then al-Qaeda will manage to make their Islamic state in Iraq, and it will be a sad day for the country and the world."

Special correspondents Saad al-Izzi and Naseer Nouri in Baghdad, Yasmin Mousa in Amman, Jordan, and other Washington Post staff in Iraq and Damascus, Syria, contributed to this report.

The Barzani Chameleon

by Kamal Said Qadir
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2007
http://www.meforum.org/article/1681

On September 11, 1961, Iraqi Kurds under the leadership of Mulla Mustafa Barzani, founder of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and father of the current Kurdish president Masoud Barzani, rose in rebellion against Iraq's central government. Kurds often portray the event as spontaneous.[1] It was not.

A declassified KGB document suggests Soviet involvement in the Kurdish rebellion was part of a Kremlin plan to disrupt Western interests in the Third World. The Kurds provided fertile ground for Soviet intrigue because of Barzani's ties to Soviet authorities.[2] After the collapse of the Mahabad Republic in Iran, Barzani took refuge in the Soviet Union.

On July 29, 1961, KGB chairman Alexander Shelepin suggested to Nikita Khrushchev, the secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party, to have Barzani (code-named Ra'is, Arabic for president) "activate the movement of the Kurdish population of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey for creation of an independent Kurdistan." If successful, the rebellion could disadvantage not only the United States and Great Britain but also U.S. allies Turkey and Iran.[3]

After the Kurdish rebellion began, the KGB sought to further exploit the situation:

P. [Peter] Ivashutin to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. September 27, 1961, St.-199/10c, 3 October 1961, TsKhSD, fond 4, opis 13, delo 85, ll. 1-4.

In accord with the decision of the CC CPSU of 1 August 1961 on the implementation of measures favouring the distraction of the attention and forces of the USA and her allies from West Berlin, and in view of the armed uprisings of the Kurdish tribes that have begun in the North of Iraq to: 1) use the KGB to organize pro-Kurdish and anti-[Abdul Karim] Kassem protests in India, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Guinea, and other countries; 2) have the KGB meet with Barzani to urge him to "seize the leadership of the Kurdish movements in his hands and to lead it along the democratic road," and to advise him to "keep a low profile in the course of this activity so that the West did not have a pretext to blame the USSR in meddling into the internal affairs of Iraq"; and 3) assign the KGB to recruit and train a "special armed detachment (500-700 men)" drawn from Kurds living in the USSR in the event that Moscow might need to send Barzani "various military experts (Artillerymen, radio operators, demolition squads, etc.)" to support the Kurdish uprising.[4]

While the Ivashutin document refers only to Barzani's relationship with the KGB in the run-up to and wake of the 1961 rebellion, other declassified material suggests ties between the Barzani family and Soviet authorities to have a long history.[5] In 1973, though, the KGB severed its relationship with Barzani after the Baath Party and Iraqi Communist Party formed a tenuous alliance and Baghdad established close military and economic ties with the Soviet Union.[6] Deprived of Soviet support, Barzani allied himself more closely with the United States, Iran, and Israel. However, in 1975, Henry Kissinger pulled the rug out from the Kurdish rebellion when he brokered a border and non-interference pact between Iran and Iraq. Mulla Mustafa Barzani took refuge in the United States where he died in 1979.[7]

How is this episode relevant today? Switching alliances is part of the Barzani family political culture, intertwining survival and power with Kurdish nationalism. Between 1980 and 1988, Masoud Barzani allied himself with Iran in its fight against Saddam, even as the revolutionary authorities in Iran turned their guns on Iranian Kurds. After long hostility to Turkey, in 1992, he allied with Ankara in its fight against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK); in 1996, he allied with Saddam Hussein against rival Kurdish leader (and current Iraqi president) Jalal Talabani. In the wake of Iraq's liberation in 2003, Barzani has portrayed himself as a U.S. ally. For how long, though, remains unclear.

Kamal Said Qadir is an Iraqi Kurdish writer based in Vienna, Austria. He was detained by KDP security forces on October 26, 2005, for criticizing corruption within the KDP and was released months later after an international campaign.

[1] Masoud Barzani, Al-Barzani wa al-Haraka at-Taharurya al-Kurdya. Al-Juz ath-Thalith: Thawrat Aylol, 1961-1975 (Erbil: Matbaat Al Tarbia, 2002), pp. 21-41.
[2] Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatolii Sudoplatov with Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994), pp. 259-64.
[3] Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 175.
[4] Reproduced in Vladislav M. Zubok, Spy vs. Spy: The KGB vs. the CIA, 1960-1962 (Cold War International History Project Bulletin), Fall 1994, pp. 22-33.
[5] For more about the history of the Barzani family, see Ayob Barzani, Al-Muqawama al-Kurdya wa al-Ihtilal, 1914-1958 (Geneva: Editions Orient-Realites, 2002), pp. 35-59.
[6] See, for example, "Kurdish Efforts to Recruit International Support," declassified CIA document, Mar. 29, 1972; Oles M. Smolansky with Bettie M. Smolansky, The USSR and Iraq: The Soviet Quest for Influence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 79-80.
[7] Smolansky, The USSR and Iraq, pp. 76-9

April 14, 2007
News Analysis
Wolfowitz Fight Has Subplot

By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, April 13 — When President Bush appointed Paul D. Wolfowitz as the president of the World Bank two years ago, the White House had to put down an insurrection among European nations that viewed the administration’s best-known neoconservative as a symbol of American unilateralism and arrogance.

For a while, Mr. Wolfowitz seemed to defuse those fears, even taking on the Bush administration over how best to aid the poorest nations of Africa. But now it is clear that the chorus of calls in recent days for Mr. Wolfowitz’s ouster is only partly about his involvement in setting up a comfortable job, with a big pay raise, for a bank officer who is Mr. Wolfowitz’s companion.

At its core, the fight about whether Mr. Wolfowitz should stay on at the bank is a debate about Mr. Bush and his tumultuous relationship with the rest of the world, particularly the bank, the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which have viewed themselves — at various moments since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — as being at war with the Bush White House and its agenda.

As finance ministers gathered in Washington on Friday for the bank’s weekend meeting, Mr. Wolfowitz worked behind the scenes, seeking support for keeping his job. But there were few endorsements of his leadership beyond those offered by the Bush administration.

In foreign capitals, and among the bank’s staff members, it has been noted that Mr. Wolfowitz’s passion for fighting corruption, which he has said saps economic life from the world’s poorest nations, seemed to evaporate when it came to reviewing lending to Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, three countries that the United States considers strategically vital. Some longtime bank staff members complained that Mr. Wolfowitz relied too little on experts in international development and too much on a pair of aides who served with him in the administration.

Members of the bank’s board from around the world began comparing what they called the murky way in which the bank made some policy decisions to the secretive habits of the Bush administration.

Nancy Birdsall, the president of the Center for Global Development, a group that monitors aid to the world’s poorest nations, described what she termed “real doubts about Wolfowitz’s judgment” inside the bank.

Mr. Wolfowitz came to the bank with heavy political baggage. Since the bank was set up at the end of World War II, its president has always been an American, a fact that has engendered more and more resentment over time. That reaction was compounded when Mr. Bush selected Mr. Wolfowitz, who had served as deputy secretary of defense and an architect of the Iraq war.

“It took a huge amount of effort to quiet this down,” a member of the bank’s board of governors and an early supporter of Mr. Wolfowitz recalled Friday of the early insurrection. “And you would think, knowing that he was going into an institution that was deeply suspicious of him and the Bush administration, that he would have done everything he could to allay those concerns.”

At first, Mr. Wolfowitz did so. He made Africa his first priority. He displayed a passion and energy for the work — much as he did many years ago as ambassador to Indonesia, where he immersed himself in the culture and took on a dictator, Suharto. His campaign against corruption was intellectually unassailable and quintessentially American, and he was certainly right as far as the facts were concerned, members of the bank’s staff and leadership say.

But eventually his focus on that issue put him at odds with career officials at an institution that is famously resistant to outside influence, and which believes that fighting poverty has to come first, even if that means dealing with countries whose leaders are not above skimming a few million dollars along the way.

“He came in to a mood of skepticism and strong reservations by many,” said Geoffrey Lamb, a former vice president of the bank, who worked closely with Mr. Wolfowitz on questions of finance for the world’s poorest nations before he retired last summer. “My feeling was that he provided a bit of reassurance, by moving actively on aid to Africa and debt forgiveness. Clearly, those early perceptions have changed a lot.”

Over time, Mr. Wolfowitz created an impression that at critical moments he was putting American foreign policy interests first, most notably when he suspended a program in Uzbekistan after the country denied landing rights to American military aircraft, and directed huge amounts of aid to the countries he once recruited to sign on to Washington’s counterterrorism agenda.

It did not help that he relied heavily on a pair of aides drawn from the Bush administration, Robin Cleveland and Kevin Kellems, who created an inner circle that the bank’s professional staff members said they had great trouble piercing.

Mr. Wolfowitz’s defenders say that he was right to come in with a mission of shaking up the ingrown bureaucracy at the bank, and that the place desperately needed shaking up. But even they acknowledge that management has never been his strong suit, and that his judgment in dealing with the transfer of his companion, Shaha Ali Riza, was questionable.

In the backlash against Mr. Wolfowitz, though, there is also an undercurrent of settling scores — including those that go beyond the World Bank. Europeans still fume over Mr. Bush’s decision to send John R. Bolton, one of the biggest critics of the United Nations, to New York to serve as ambassador there — an experiment that ended when it became clear that the newly Democratic Senate would not confirm him to finish Mr. Bush’s term.

Others recall that the administration tried to fire Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian-born head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who famously declared in early 2003 that there was no evidence Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program. Dr. ElBaradei proved to be right, and was soon awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

So far, the White House has expressed confidence in Mr. Wolfowitz, but not with much vigor. There were no signs that President Bush was about to rush to his aid, though that could still happen. European and Asian officials bet it will not.

“There is a sense that we’re finally at a moment when Bush needs the world more than the world needs Bush,” said a senior foreign official who flew into Washington recently for the annual meeting of the bank and the International Monetary Fund. “And there’s more than a little of that mixed in this whole argument over Wolfowitz’s fate.”

GMT 4-14-2007 19:12:46
Assyrian International News Agency
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Baghdad (AINA) -- An unidentified Islamic group has been threatening the Chrisitan Assyrians (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs) in the Dora district of Baghdad, a traditionally Assyrian area. The Islamic group issued an ultimatum yesterday to Assyrian families, telling them to leave Christianity and convert to Islam within 24 hours or they would all be killed. The Islamic group also issued a fatwa (a religious edict) to confiscate the property of all Christians, to force Assyrian women to veil themselves, to forbid genuflection (making the sign of the Cross) and the wearing of the Cross.

Earlier the same Islamic group forcefully removed the Cross from the churches of St. John and St. George. An affiliated Islamic group in Northern Iraq occupied the Assyrian monastery of Raban Hormuz.

The persecution of the Assyrians in the Dora district has been relentless:

March 18, 2007: Muslims Force Assyrians in Dora to pay a 'Protection Tax'
November 8, 2004: Two bombs exploded outside two churches in southern Baghdad quarters of Dora. Three people were dead and around 40 to 50 injured.
November 2, 2004 An unidentified group surprised and fired upon an Assyrian family in Dora, Meekanik quarters, south of Baghdad. 'Alaa' Andrawis (b. 1965), his wife Evelyn Malkizdaq, and their 10-years old son were shot at while in their car.
October 21, 2004 Layla Elias Kakka Essa (aged 30s), a translator in the Assyrian quarters of Dora, was shot and killed.
October 16, 2004 The St. Joseph church in Dora is hit with a bomb, along with four other churches in Baghdad
June 11, 2004: Four masked men entered the Assyrian Christian district of Dora in a civilian sedan and opened fire on the Assyrians, killing four and wounding several others.
March 22, 2004: An Assyrian Elderly couple, Ameejon Barama and his wife Jewded, were brutally murdered in their own home in Dora. The husband's throat was slashed and the wife was struck repeatedly to the head.
See also the following:

Violence Against Iraqi Assyrians Since the Liberation of Iraq
Muslims Forcing Christian Assyrians in Baghdad Neighborhood to Pay 'Protection Tax'
Assyrian Testifies At the Congressional Human Rights Caucus
Iraq's Christians Live In Fear
Seven Assyrians Gunned Down In Baghdad
Iraqi Church Bombers: 'Christians Are Grandchildren of Monkeys and Swines'
Chaldean Seminary Rector Kidnapped in Iraq
Christians Live in Fear of Death Squads in Iraq
Iraq's Christians Flee As Extremist Threat Worsens
Iraqi Christians on Edge After Priest's Kidnapping
Fire Consumes Over 500 Assyrian Shops in Baghdad Suburb
Three Killed in Church Bombing in Baghdad
Iraqis Squeezed Out By Kurdish Expansion, Muslim-Centric Constitution
Continuing Attacks Against Assyrians in Iraq Renew Calls for a Safe Haven
Terrorist Attacks on Assyrians Intensify

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April 15, 2007
Eye on Iran, Rivals Pursuing Nuclear Power

By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
Two years ago, the leaders of Saudi Arabia told international atomic regulators that they could foresee no need for the kingdom to develop nuclear power. Today, they are scrambling to hire atomic contractors, buy nuclear hardware and build support for a regional system of reactors.

So, too, Turkey is preparing for its first atomic plant. And Egypt has announced plans to build one on its Mediterranean coast. In all, roughly a dozen states in the region have recently turned to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna for help in starting their own nuclear programs. While interest in nuclear energy is rising globally, it is unusually strong in the Middle East.

“The rules have changed,” King Abdullah II of Jordan recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “Everybody’s going for nuclear programs.”

The Middle East states say they only want atomic power. Some probably do. But United States government and private analysts say they believe that the rush of activity is also intended to counter the threat of a nuclear Iran.

By nature, the underlying technologies of nuclear power can make electricity or, with more effort, warheads, as nations have demonstrated over the decades by turning ostensibly civilian programs into sources of bomb fuel. Iran’s uneasy neighbors, analysts say, may be positioning themselves to do the same.

“One danger of Iran going nuclear has always been that it might provoke others,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an arms analysis group in London. “So when you see the development of nuclear power elsewhere in the region, it’s a cause for some concern.”

Some analysts ask why Arab states in the Persian Gulf, which hold nearly half the world’s oil reserves, would want to shoulder the high costs and obligations of a temperamental form of energy. They reply that they must invest in the future, for the day when the flow of oil dries up.

But with Shiite Iran increasingly ascendant in the region, Sunni countries have alluded to other motives. Officials from 21 governments in and around the Middle East warned at an Arab summit meeting in March that Iran’s drive for atomic technology could result in the beginning of “a grave and destructive nuclear arms race in the region.”

In Washington, officials are seizing on such developments to build their case for stepping up pressure on Iran. President Bush has talked privately to experts on the Middle East about his fears of a “Sunni bomb,” and his concerns that countries in the Middle East may turn to the only nuclear-armed Sunni state, Pakistan, for help.

“It’s a constant source of discussion,” a senior administration official said recently. “But it’s not something the president thinks he can discuss publicly” after the imbroglio over faulty weapons intelligence on Iraq.

The Middle East has seen hints of a regional nuclear-arms race before. After Israel obtained its first weapon four decades ago, several countries took steps down the nuclear road. But many analysts say it is Iran’s atomic intransigence that has now prodded the Sunni powers into getting serious about hedging their bets and, like Iran, financing them with $65-a-barrel oil.

“Now’s the time to worry,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East expert at the Nixon Center, a Washington policy institute. “The Iranians have to worry, too. The idea that they’ll emerge as the regional hegemon is silly. There will be a very serious counterreaction, certainly in conventional military buildups but also in examining the nuclear option.”

No Arab country now has a power reactor, whose spent fuel can be mined for plutonium, one of the two favored materials — along with uranium — for making the cores of atom bombs. Some Arab states do, however, engage in civilian atomic research.

Analysts caution that a chain reaction of nuclear emulation is not foreordained. States in the Middle East appear to be waiting to see which way Tehran’s nuclear standoff with the United Nations Security Council goes before committing themselves wholeheartedly to costly programs of atomic development.

Even if Middle Eastern nations do obtain nuclear power, political alliances and arms-control agreements could still make individual states hesitate before crossing the line to obtain warheads. Many may eventually decide that the costs and risks outweigh the benefits — as South Korea, Taiwan, South Africa and Libya did after investing heavily in arms programs.

But many diplomats and analysts say that the Sunni Arab governments are so anxious about Iran’s nuclear progress that they would even, grudgingly, support a United States military strike against Iran.

“If push comes to shove, if the choice is between an Iranian nuclear bomb and a U.S. military strike, then the Arab gulf states have no choice but to quietly support the U.S.,” said Christian Koch, director of international studies at the Gulf Research Center, a private group in Dubai.

Decades ago, it was Israel’s drive for nuclear arms that brought about the region’s first atomic jitters. Even some Israeli leaders found themselves “preaching caution because of the reaction,” said Avner Cohen, a senior fellow at the University of Maryland and the author of “Israel and the Bomb.”

Egypt responded first. In 1960, after the disclosure of Israel’s work on a nuclear reactor, Cairo threatened to acquire atomic arms and sought its own reactor. Years of technical and political hurdles ultimately ended that plan.

Iraq came next. But in June 1981, Israeli fighter jets bombed its reactor just days before engineers planned to install the radioactive core. The bombing ignited a global debate over how close Iraq had come to nuclear arms. It also prompted Iran, then fighting a war with Iraq, to embark on a covert response.

Alireza Assar, a nuclear adviser to Iran’s Ministry of Defense who later defected, said he attended a secret meeting in 1987 at which the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Iran had to do whatever was necessary to achieve victory. “We need to have all the technical requirements in our possession,” Dr. Assar recalled the commander as saying, even the means to “build a nuclear bomb.”

In all, Iran toiled in secret for 18 years before its nuclear efforts were disclosed in 2003. Intelligence agencies and nuclear experts now estimate that the Iranians are 2 to 10 years away from having the means to make a uranium-based bomb. It says its uranium enrichment work is entirely peaceful and meant only to fuel reactors.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s concerns peaked when inspectors found evidence of still-unexplained ties between Iran’s ostensibly peaceful program and its military, including work on high explosives, missiles and warheads. That combination, the inspectors said in early 2006, suggested a “military nuclear dimension.”

Before such disclosures, few if any states in the Middle East attended the atomic agency’s meetings on nuclear power development. Now, roughly a dozen are doing so and drawing up atomic plans.

The newly interested states include Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen and the seven sheikdoms of the United Arab Emirates — Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Al Fujayrah, Ras al Khaymah, Sharjah, and Umm al Qaywayn.

“They generally ask what they need to do for the introduction of power,” said R. Ian Facer, a nuclear power engineer who works for the I.A.E.A. at its headquarters in Vienna. The agency teaches the basics of nuclear energy. In exchange, states must undergo periodic inspections to make sure their civilian programs have no military spinoffs.

Saudi Arabia, since reversing itself on reactors, has become a whirlwind of atomic interest. It recently invited President Vladimir V. Putin to become the first Russian head of state to visit the desert kingdom. He did so in February, offering a range of nuclear aid.

Diplomats and analysts say Saudi Arabia leads the drive for nuclear power within the Gulf Cooperation Council, based in Riyadh. In addition to the Saudis, the council includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — Washington’s closest Arab allies. Its member states hug the western shores of the Persian Gulf and control about 45 percent of the world’s oil reserves.

Late last year, the council announced that it would embark on a nuclear energy program. Its officials have said they want to get it under way by 2009.

“We will develop it openly,” Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said of the council’s effort. “We want no bombs. All we want is a whole Middle East that is free from weapons of mass destruction,” an Arab reference to both Israel’s and Iran’s nuclear programs.

In February, the council and the I.A.E.A. struck a deal to work together on a nuclear power plan for the Arab gulf states. Abdul Rahman ibn Hamad al-Attiya, the council’s secretary general, told reporters in March that the agency would provide technical expertise and that the council would hire a consulting firm to speed its nuclear deliberations.

Already, Saudi officials are traveling regularly to Vienna, and I.A.E.A. officials to Riyadh, the Saudi capital. “It’s a natural right,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the atomic agency’s director general, said recently of the council’s energy plan, estimating that carrying it out might take up to 15 years.

In all, 85 percent of the gulf states — all but Iraq — have declared their interest in nuclear power. By comparison, 15 percent of South American nations and 20 percent of African ones have done so.

One factor in that exceptional level of interest is that the Persian Gulf states have the means. Typically, a large commercial reactor costs up to $4 billion. The six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council are estimated to be investing in nonnuclear projects valued at more than $1 trillion.

Another factor is Iran. Its shores at some points are visible across the waters of the gulf — the Arabian Gulf to Arabs, the Persian Gulf to Iranians.

The council wants “its own regional initiative to counter the possible threat from an aggressive neighbor armed with nuclear weapons,” said Nicole Stracke, an analyst at the Gulf Research Center. Its members, she added, “felt they could no longer lag behind Iran.”

A similar technology push is under way in Turkey, where long-simmering plans for nuclear power have caught fire. Last year, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for three plants. “We want to benefit from nuclear energy as soon as possible,” he said. Turkey plans to put its first reactor near the Black Sea port of Sinop, and to start construction this year.

Egypt, too, is moving forward. Last year, it announced plans for a reactor at El-Dabaa, about 60 miles west of Alexandria. “We do not start from a vacuum,” President Hosni Mubarak told the governing National Democracy Party’s annual conference. His remark was understated given Cairo’s decades of atomic research.

Robert Joseph, a former under secretary of state for arms control and international security who is now Mr. Bush’s envoy on nuclear nonproliferation, visited Egypt earlier this year. According to officials briefed on the conversations, officials from the Ministry of Electricity indicated that if Egypt was confident that it could have a reliable supply of reactor fuel, it would have little desire to invest in the costly process of manufacturing its own nuclear fuel — the enterprise that experts fear could let Iran build a bomb.

Other officials, especially those responsible for Egypt’s security, focused more on the possibility of further proliferation in the region if Iran succeeded in its effort to achieve a nuclear weapons capability.

“I don’t know how much of it is real,” Mr. Joseph said of a potential arms race. “But it is becoming urgent for us to shape the future expansion of nuclear energy in a way that reduces the risks of proliferation, while meeting our energy and environmental goals.”