The question is how much influence is Iran going to have in the Shiite dominated Iraq? One good thing is that Al Sistani is a pretty big proponent of the clergy staying out of the workings of government.
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December 9, 2004
Iraqi Shiites Announce Coalition of Candidates
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:19 a.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq's most powerful Shiite groups Thursday unveiled a unified list of 228 candidates for the Jan. 30 elections, a key step in their bid to take a leading role in post-Saddam Iraq after years on the sidelines. The list, however, does not include prominent Sunni factions.
In violence in the run-up to next month's vote, seven Iraqis were killed in separate clashes in Baghdad and the volatile western city of Ramadi.
A car bomb also rocked a busy Mosul vegetable market, wounding two civilians, while a U.S. soldier was injured by roadside bomb in the capital. Another American soldier suffered minor injuries in a similar attack the day before in Samarra, the scene of clashes that culminated in the resignation of the town's police chief.
The al-Sistani-backed coalition, called the United Iraqi Alliance, includes two major Shiite political parties -- the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution and the Islamic Dawa Party -- and the Iraqi National Congress, led by former exile and one-time Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi, Dawa party official Ali al-Adeeb told a news conference.
Independent Sunni Muslims belonging to various tribal groups are included on the list, but no major Sunni political movements were named.
``I think that this list is a patriotic list. We hope that Iraqi people will back this list,'' Sheik Fawaz al-Jarba, head of the powerful Sunni Shemar tribes in the northwestern city of Mosul, said at the end of the conference.
A Shiite Kurdish group, members of the Yazidis minority religious sect, and a Turkomen movement were also included on the multiparty list for the elections -- the first popular vote since Saddam Hussein's ouster. Iraqis will choose a 275-member assembly that will write a permanent constitution. If adopted in a referendum next year, the constitution would form the legal basis for another general election to be held by Dec. 15, 2005.
Under an election law adopted this year, there will be no electoral boundaries for the January vote, with the entire country treated as a single constituency.
Major parties representing Iraq's 20 percent minority Sunnis have called for the vote's postponement because they say the country is not secure enough. Sunni clerics from the Association of Muslim Scholars urged Sunnis to boycott the election to protest last month's U.S.-led assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.
The influential religious group reiterated its call for Sunnis to boycott the polls, describing as ``madness'' plans to hold them in January.
``The association's stance toward the elections is firm and unchanged -- we will not take a part in these elections because ... no elections can be held under the pressure of the Americans and the ... deteriorating security situation,'' said Sheik Mohamed Bashar Al-Faidhi, an association spokesman.
Farid Ayar, spokesman of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, said the party of Sunni politician Adnan Pachachi, who supported the call for postponing the elections, was among the first to register after the sign-up process began Nov. 1.
He added, however, that the party -- the Independent Democratic Movement -- has yet to submit a candidates' list. Pachachi was not immediately available for comment.
One of six people who drew up the United Iraqi Alliance list, nuclear physicist Hussain al-Shahristani, said the movement of firebrand anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had been left off the list because it has not registered with Iraq's electoral commission. It was not immediately clear if any al-Sadr supporters were on the list as independents.
``The Sadrist movement announced that it supports the religious authorities and its call for Iraqis to hold elections,'' al-Shahristani added. ``It also supports the list.''
Al-Sistani, an Iranian-born cleric, has been working to unite Iraq's majority Shiites ahead of the vote to ensure victory, plus include representatives from Iraq's other diverse communities.
Al-Sistani has been overseeing the work of top aides to compile the list for the national elections, which Shiite parties are expected to perform strongly in.
Shiites comprise 60 percent of Iraq's 26 million population. Despite their numbers, they've enjoyed little political power in Iraq, particularly under Saddam, who belonged to Iraq's minority Sunni community.
``The different parties and the national figures asked the religious authority to help it form an alliance that represents the Iraqi spectrum with its various religious, ethnic and geographic components,'' al-Shahristani said.
Al-Sistani has been working to unite Iraq's majority Shiites ahead of the vote to ensure victory, plus include representatives from Iraq's other diverse communities. The Iranian-born cleric is overseeing the work of top aides seeking to compile a 165-candidate list, which would be put to the voters nationwide.
In another play for postelection power, a senior Kurdish official said a Kurd should be made either president or prime minister following the polls.
``We have the right to ask for one of the (two) top positions in the government after the elections and we insist on taking one of them,'' Arsalan Biez, a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's political bureau, said from the northeastern city of Sulaimaniyah, 162 miles northeast of Baghdad.
``We are as a nation like other world's nations and we must receive our rights and demands.''
Kurds are estimated to number between 15 percent and 20 percent of the population and have enjoyed regional self-rule in the north since 1991. Kurdish statehood aspirations have alarmed neighboring Turkey, Syria and Iran, which fear that granting Iraqi Kurds an ethnic enclave could incite separatist sentiments among Kurdish minorities within their own borders.
In renewed violence, militants fired multiple mortar rounds toward an Iraqi National Guard base and the nearby Italian Embassy in Baghdad's Waziriyah neighborhood. Police Lt. Hussein Ali said three civilians were killed and five wounded.
Insurgents and U.S. forces clashed in downtown Ramadi, a volatile city west of Baghdad, and four Iraqis were killed and three injured, according to Dr. Dhiaa Daham Hannoush of Ramadi General Hospital. U.S. military officials had no immediate comment.
Two Iraqis were injured after a car bomb exploded in the northwestern city of Mosul, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Paul Hastings said. Iraqi policeman Hassan Ahmed said the blast happened in fruit and vegetable market.
Mosul has been the scene of regular attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces by insurgents aimed at derailing the country's reconstruction ahead of the elections.
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