| Iraq-Jordan |
| Fifteen Sunni Arabs to join officially Iraq constitutional committee |
| 2005-07-04 |
| The 15 Sunni Arabs nominated to join a parliamentary committee drafting Iraq's new constitution will officially join Wednesday, clearing the last hurdle in bringing the minority sect into the process, a senior legislator said. The body was scheduled to welcome the new members Tuesday and they would officially begin their duties the following day, committee chairman Hummam Hammoudi was quoted as saying by The Associated Press on Monday. |
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| Iraq-Jordan |
| New offensive launched in Anbar |
| 2005-06-28 |
| A suicide car bomb killed a Shiite legislator and three others near Baghdad on Tuesday, an attack likely to further fuel ethnic tensions on the one-year anniversary of the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqi authorities. Separately, more than 1,000 U.S. troops and Iraqi forces launched Operation Sword in a bid to crush insurgents and foreign fighters in western Iraq, the third major offensive in the area in recent weeks. National Assembly legislator Dhari Ali al-Fayadh and his son were killed in the suicide attack while traveling to parliament from their farm in Rashidiya, 20 miles northeast of Baghdad, said parliamentarian Hummam Hammoudi, who heads a committee charged with drafting a new constitution. Two of al-Fayadh's bodyguards were also killed, and four were wounded, police Maj. Falah al-Mihamadawi said. Al-Fayadh was a senior sheik from the al-Boamer tribe in the Mahmoudiya area, about 20 miles south of Baghdad and a hotbed of the Sunni-dominated insurgency. Al-Boamer includes both Sunni and Shiite clans. "Those who killed the sheik are the enemies of the Iraqi people at large," Hammoudi said. Al-Fayadh, in his late 80s, was the eldest member of the new parliament that was installed about three months ago and he had acted as speaker until one was elected. He was a member of the country's largest Shiite political party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Al-Fayadh was the second Shiite legislator to be killed since the new parliament started work in March. Lamia Abed Khadouri al-Sagri was killed April 27 in eastern Baghdad. She was a member of the Iraqi List party. The country's Shiites are already on edge following a series of car bombings last week that killed nearly 40 people in predominantly Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad. With the Sunni Arab-dominated insurgency targeting the Shiite majority, the wave of killings has raised fears of civil war. Elsewhere on Tuesday, a suicide car bomber slammed into a convoy carrying Kirkuk traffic police chief Brig. Gen. Salar Ahmed, killing one of his bodyguards and a civilian in the northern city, police Lt. Assad Mohammed said. Four were wounded, including Ahmed and three of his bodyguards. Kirkuk is 180 miles north of Baghdad. The new U.S.-led military campaign is focusing on communities along the Euphrates River between the towns of Hit and Haditha in the volatile Anbar province, said Marine Capt. Jeffrey Pool, a spokesman. The U.S. troops include Marines, soldiers and sailors from Regimental Combat Team 2, which is part of the 2nd Marine Division. The region, about 125 miles northwest of Baghdad, is a hotbed of insurgent activity. Operation Sword, or Saif in Arabic, comes on the heels of two other offensives â dubbed Operations Spear and Dagger. Operation Spear was aimed at stemming the flow of foreign fighters over the porous Syrian border in Karabilah, which is near the Iraqi frontier town of Qaim. The U.S. military said nearly 50 insurgents were killed during the five-day operation. Operation Dagger took place north of Baghdad. It was aimed at uprooting foreign-fighter networks. The U.S.-led coalition has carried out other offensive and raids in recent months, detaining hundreds of suspected insurgents. Consequently, the U.S. military said Monday it's expanding its overcrowded prisons across Iraq to hold as many as 16,000 detainees. The prison population at three military complexes throughout the country â Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and Camp Cropper â has nearly doubled from 5,435 in June 2004 to 10,002 now, said Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, a spokesman for detainee operations in Iraq. Some 400 non-Iraqis are among the inmates, according to the military. All renovations should be done by February. There have been positive developments in the year since the June 28, 2004, handover, the most notable being the election of the 275-member National Assembly on Jan. 30, Iraq's first free vote in a half-century. Smaller gains have been made as well. The number of telephone and Internet subscribers has increased nearly threefold, according to the Washington-based Brookings Institution, and the number of trained Iraqi judges has doubled. However, the insurgency â estimated at about 16,000 Iraqi militants and foreign fighters â has drastically overshadowed the improvements and created havoc around the country. The situation has forced the implementation of a daily 11 p.m. curfew in Baghdad. |
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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Shi'ites, Sunnis reach compromise |
| 2005-06-16 |
| Senior members of a Shiite-dominated committee drafting Iraq's new constitution reached a compromise Thursday with Sunni Arab groups on the number of representatives the minority will have on the body drafting the charter. The agreement broke weeks of deadlock between the 55-member committee and Sunni Arabs over the size of their representation. The stalemate had threatened to derail Iraq's political process as it was about to enter its final stretch, with two key nationwide votes later this year — a constitutional referendum and a general election. Under the deal, 15 Sunni Arabs would join two members of the minority already on the committee. Another 10 Sunni Arabs would join, but only in an advisory capacity. News of the deal was announced by two lawmakers who sit on the committee — Shiite Bahaa al-Aaraji and Sunni Arab Adnan al-Janabi. Both have led contacts with the Sunni Arab community over the size of their participation in the constitutional process. They also attended a meeting Thursday with 70 representatives of the Sunni community over the issue. The United States and the European Union have called for the inclusion of the Sunni Arabs in the drafting of the constitution to ensure the credibility and success of the process. Al-Aaraji and al-Janabi said Sunni Arabs would submit a list of their candidates next week, and that parliament would subsequently issue a statement welcoming the expansion of the constitutional committee. "It was a cordial meeting," al-Aaraji said. "They will set up a five-member committee to draw up a list of 15 candidates which they will submit to us in three days." Because the 15 Sunni Arabs to be added are not elected members of parliament, they would join the committee's 55 legislators in a parallel body. That 70-member body would make decisions by consensus and pass them back to the 55 lawmakers for ratification. The 15 new members are two more than what the chairman of the constitutional committee, Shiite cleric Hummam Hammoudi, had proposed Wednesday. Leaders of the Sunni Arab community had wanted 25 people to join the two legislators already on the committee, but Shiite and Kurdish lawmakers balked at the demand. They argued that such a large number could be taken as a tacit acknowledgment that the minority was larger than estimated. The compromise would give them two seats less than the Sunni Arabs, whose share of the population is equal to theirs. Iraq's 275-seat parliament, elected in historic January elections that were boycotted by most Sunni Arabs, has until Aug. 15 to prepare a new constitution that will be put to a nationwide referendum two months later. If approved, it will serve as the basis for a new general election to be held in December. A Sunni Arab boycott allowed the Shiites and Kurds to win the majority of seats in parliament. There are only 17 Sunni Arabs on the body. The deadlock over Sunni Arab participation in the constitutional process has stoked sectarian tensions in Iraq and coincided with a marked escalation in the two-year, Sunni-dominated insurgency. |
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| Iraq-Jordan |
| 2 insurgent groups agree to talks with the new Iraqi government |
| 2005-06-07 |
| A Sunni Arab politician claimed on Tuesday that two insurgent groups were ready to open talks with the government and eventually lay down their arms and join the political process. The disclosure by Ayham al-Samarie was the first time any Iraqi politician has publicly acknowledged contacting Iraq's militants. It also opened a new front in ongoing efforts to counter the Sunni-dominated insurgency wracking much of Iraq since 2003. They came at a time of growing complaints by Sunni Arab groups that counterinsurgency operations by US-backed Iraqi forces are unjustly targeting innocent members of the community. It was not possible to independently verify al-Samarie's claims and the government would not comment on them. A senior Shiite legislator, Hummam Hammoudi, said last week that Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's government has opened indirect channels of communication with some insurgent groups, exchanging messages through intermediaries to convince them to lay down their arms. Al-Samarie, a graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology who has a dual US-Iraqi citizenship, said the two groups were the Islamic Army in Iraq and the Army of Mujahedeen, or holy warriors. He said he had not met any of their field commanders but began contacting their political leaders about five months ago. He did not name them. Speaking to The Associated Press in an interview, he said the two factions represented more than 50 percent of the "resistance," the term used by many in Iraq to exclude militant groups working with Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi of Al Qaeda in Iraq and others who target civilians as well as Iraq's security forces. The Islamic Army in Iraq has claimed responsibility for several attacks and is believed to be responsible for the kidnapping and slaying of several of the more than 200 foreigners taken hostage over the past 18 months. Little has been heard from the Mujahedeen Army in recent months, but it claimed responsibility for scores of attacks in 2003 and early last year. Al-Samarie, a former electricity minister in Iraq's two former postwar interim governments, said there was no agreement for the two groups to lay down their weapons or declare a cease-fire, but that a truce with a limited duration could possibly be arranged to prove their goodwill after talks get underway. "We told them that no one knows what you want. You say you want the occupier to leave Iraq but what do you want after that? You must have a political agenda. You must come out to the political arena and make clear what you want'," said al-Samarie. "They set no conditions and we agreed with them that the time has come for them to come out," he added, but would not disclose who else was involved. Al-Samarie also announced the news about the two groups on the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite TV station, saying their representatives would be part of an umbrella group he is forming. Several Sunni Arab organizations and political groups, like the influential Association of Muslim Scholars, have long been suspected of having links with the insurgency. "The new thing here is that the resistance has decided to come out in person rather than have others speaking on its behalf," said al-Samarie, who spoke at his home in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood. He said he had run the idea of bringing insurgency factions into the political fold past several US officials during a visit to Washington last month. He claimed to have discussed it with National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and senior State Department official Richard Jones, who served as a deputy to Iraq's former US governor L. Paul Bremmer. He said he was encouraged by their reaction. "The Americans are very practical. They don't want the loss in Iraq of their sons and daughters to continue," said al-Samarie. "I don't think we will have a problem with the multinational force either," he said, alluding to the US-dominated, 160,000-strong multinational force in Iraq. He said he had sometime ago informally told members of al-Jaafari's Shiite-dominated government of his intentions to contact the insurgents. "I have received various reactions from them, but none were too strong," he said. There has been no public reaction from the government to his announcement on al-Arabiya. "I think they'll bless this move. The government must take this initiative seriously and start talking to these brothers (from the insurgency) to solve Iraq's problems," he said, adding that the government was divided over whether contacts should be made with insurgents. Laith Kuba, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, declined to comment on the report, saying he only became aware of it through the media. A spokesman for the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the largest Shiite political party and a key part of the governing alliance, would only say that his party was prepared to talk to any group - except terrorists and remnants of Saddam's regime. He said representatives of the two insurgency groups would attend a meeting of his new umbrella group later this month in restive Anbar province, and that he planned to ask Iraqi and US military authorities to guarantee their safety. |
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