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Iraq

Sunni group: Sign up and vote

By wire services
Published July 5, 2005

BAGHDAD - In what might be a sign of a new political landscape, a major Sunni umbrella group called on its members on Monday to register for the next round of elections and take part "despite our reservations."

Adnan al-Dulaimi, the head of the group, called the Sunni Endowment, said in a briefing in Baghdad that clerics would be asked to issue religious rulings, or fatwas, essentially ordering Sunnis to vote in elections. Among its other functions, the Sunni Endowment is charged with oversight of Sunni Arab mosques and holy sites throughout Iraq, giving it wide influence among clerics.

"I ask all Sunni people to register their names for the next election, because we are in a political battle that depends on the vote," Dulaimi said.

Sunni Arabs largely boycotted the January elections, producing a National Assembly with only a handful of Sunnis, leaving the ethnic group that ruled the country until 2003 with little influence in the government.

The next round of voting will include a referendum on a constitution, a document being hammered out in the National Assembly.

Perhaps as significant as his call for voting, Dulaimi explicitly renounced violence as a way for the Sunnis to regain power. But like many other Sunni groups, Dulaimi asserted that his group was not a minority in Iraq, despite various estimates suggesting that Sunnis make up about 20 percent of the population.

Iraq's ethnically based political strife was also on display on Monday in Kirkuk, in the north, where more than 2,000 Arabs and Turkmens demonstrated against the Kurdish rule that has settled on the city since the elections in January.

A Kurdish slate won 26 of 41 seats in the City Council and recently put in place significant changes in the way the city was run.

Important posts went overwhelmingly to Kurdish officials, claimed Ali Mehdi, a leader of the Turkmen front. The Turkmens were an Asian people put into place by the Turks to govern the area during Ottoman rule.

"The current administration, which is formed by Kurdish parties, does not represent the people of Kirkuk," Mehdi said at the demonstration, in Convention Square.

Muhammad Khalil, a City Council member who serves as a spokesman for Arab members of the council, asserted that the refusal of the Kurdish bloc to compromise had forced other groups to form what he called a "shadow government" for the city.

Marching in heavy security, people in the crowd raised banners denouncing federalism, the political decentralization favored by Kurds, who want the area to maintain a large degree of local control.

Baghdad was unusually quiet Monday, although an Interior Ministry official said at least two roadside bombs had gone off, killing at least three civilians and wounding three more. Both bombs exploded in the dangerous southern fringes of the city.

In Cairo, the family of the kidnapped Egyptian envoy, Ihab al-Sherif, said they had received no message from the kidnappers. Witnesses said the kidnappers accused Sherif of being an "American spy" and shoved him into the trunk of a car after he stopped at a shop to buy a newspaper.

Egypt announced last month that it would become the first Arab country to post an ambassador to Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Further details emerged Monday from witnesses to the kidnapping on a Baghdad street. One of the four kidnappers struck Sherif in the head with a pistol so hard that he began to bleed, said an employee at Al Arjas photography lab, just a few feet from the kidnapping.

Syria reports clash with Hussein-linked militants

DAMASCUS, Syria - The Syrian government said its security forces clashed Monday with a band of militants - including former bodyguards of toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and others involved in the insurgency in Iraq - on a resort mountain overlooking Damascus.

It was the latest in a series of confrontations with militants that Syria says counter U.S. claims it is not doing enough to stop foreign Islamic radicals slipping over the border to fight U.S. and Iraqi forces.

The battle erupted at 1 a.m. on Qassioun Mountain, which overlooks Damascus. One policeman was killed and two were injured along with two soldiers, the official news agency SANA reported, quoting an unidentified Information Ministry official. After the battle, security forces were pursuing a number of suspects who escaped, the report said.

Gonzales: U.S. agents to aid fight against crime

ABOARD AIR FORCE TWO - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in announcing a new anticrime task force in Iraq modeled loosely on the antiterrorism and antigang units common in the United States, outlined a significant shift from earlier U.S. efforts to bolster the Iraqi justice system.

Under the plan, FBI agents and other U.S. investigators will play a direct role in helping to develop evidence and identify suspects in attacks against U.S. forces.

Criminal prosecutions will be left up to the new Iraqi court system, U.S. officials said.

--Information from the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press was used in this report.

[Last modified July 5, 2005, 19:50:47]