By Xinhua
Baghdad : The Iraqi government said Saturday that despite the country’s security situation has improved, there has been little progress in political reconciliation because of the lack of trust among divided sects.
“We need political reforms and there must be steps to bring the parties together,” government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told news conference in Baghdad’s Green Zone.
“There is no good relations among the parties, actually there is lack of trust among them,” he said.
Dabbagh made the remarks as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is facing challenges after the Shiite Sadr movement, loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, pulled its six ministers out of Maliki’s cabinet in April, saying the government had failed to provide based services to the people.
The National Accordance Front, the main Sunni bloc which has 44members in the 275-member parliament had also pulled its five ministers and a deputy prime minister from the cabinet.
Maliki had recently replaced two of the six Sadr’s ministers along with his efforts to persuade the Sunni members to return to the cabinet, according to Dabbagh.
Dabbagh, meanwhile, noted that on the other hand the country’s security has improved and the violence level had dropped substantially across Iraq.
The spokesman attributed the improvement to Iran which was showing signs of “halting sending people and weapons to destabilize Iraq” and to the freeze of activities of Mahdi Army by Moqtada al-Sadr.
He also gave another reason that the U.S. military recruited large numbers of people to protect their neighborhoods against insurgents.