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Red on Red in Ramadi and Mosul

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  • Red on Red in Ramadi and Mosul

    AQ is losing its support base in Iraq. I wish they gave more details about the execution in Mosul - the IIP's headquarters in Mosul was in my zone.

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    Washington Post
    August 20, 2005
    Pg. 1

    3 Sunni Activists Killed In Iraq

    Vote Promoters Slain in Front of Horrified Crowd

    By Ellen Knickmeyer and Dlovan Brwari, Washington Post Foreign Service

    MOSUL, Iraq, Aug. 19 -- Gunmen in this northern city Friday abducted and publicly executed three Sunni Arab activists who had been working to draw the disgruntled Sunni minority into Iraq's political mainstream, and then draped their bodies in a get-out-the-vote banner, officials and witnesses said.

    The killings, before a horrified crowd, were the latest episode in the accelerating violence between suspected insurgents and the Sunni minority that has been their base of support.

    One witness, Muhammed Khalid, said armed men traveling in eight cars kidnapped the activists as they were hanging banners encouraging voter participation. An hour later, gunmen appeared in another neighborhood. They blocked off side roads, stopped people from fleeing and forbade frightened shopkeepers to close their establishments, witnesses said.

    "Then they took three men out of their cars and killed them in front of us," said a witness, Harith Saleem. He quoted one of the killers as saying, "This is the punishment for those who promote the elections."

    In the western city of Ramadi, meanwhile, Sunni tribal members shot and killed a Saudi and three other members of the country's main insurgent group, al Qaeda in Iraq, headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi , witnesses and sources said. Killings there, too, marked rapidly escalating tensions between foreign-led fighters and Sunnis.

    The political violence came as all Iraq's factions jostled for position in the reshaping of their nation, more than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

    In Baghdad, debate over the role of Islamic law deadlocked the drafting of Iraq's new constitution, with more-secular Iraqis balking at terms they say would subjugate Iraq to the rule of clerics, negotiators said.

    Iraqis are due to vote in October on a new constitution and then in December for their first full-term government, which will determine how the constitution is interpreted and enforced.

    Iraq's political leaders and constitution committee members face a Monday deadline -- already postponed by a week -- to put a draft constitution before parliament, ahead of the October vote. U.S. and Iraqi leaders have insisted that completing the constitution will calm political violence. Friday's attacks, however, suggested that the bloodletting would persist at least through the scheduled December elections.

    Negotiators said Friday that all sides had reached accord on the critical issue of federalism, which will determine how much independent say the largely Kurdish north and predominantly Shiite south will have in running their affairs. The accord reached Friday would recognize a northern federal state for the Kurds and give other regions the same option if approved by local voters and by parliament, Shiite and Kurdish officials said.

    Those terms leave the way open for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq -- now the dominant party in Iraq's interim government -- to make a separate federal state in the Shiite south out of as many as half of Iraq's 18 provinces.

    Members of the constitution committee said they were still divided on how Iraq's oil wealth should be allocated. But the bigger dispute, emerging early Saturday, was over the role of Islam. The current rough draft stipulates that Iraq is an Islamic state and that no law can contradict the basic principles of Islam.

    More-secular Sunnis and Kurds have backed changing that wording to the "agreed-upon" principles of Islam -- thereby greatly limiting the myriad Islamic rules that could be applied to laws. Those groups had appeared sanguine about prospects of winning that concession, but early Saturday they said they had failed.

    "You try and put these phrases in, it creates a theocracy, and people don't want this," one negotiator said, speaking by telephone and on condition of anonymity. "Nobody could bring a beer here, nobody could go in the streets without a scarf. Did America want that?"

    Officials said U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been an active broker in the talks, had supported the stricter, Shiite-led position on the role of Islam. Khalilzad and his aides could not be reached for comment early Saturday.

    In Washington, an administration official said, "There clearly continues to be disagreement, but talks have not collapsed. They're clearly at a critical stage. I would expect intensive negotiations to continue among everybody tomorrow and through the weekend."

    The attack in Mosul targeted members of the Iraq Islamic Party, which had been lobbying for Sunnis to take part in the coming elections. Iraq's Sunni minority largely boycotted the January elections that seated the current transitional government, led by Shiites and Kurds. Threats from insurgents also contributed to the boycott. The resulting small turnout left Sunnis with comparatively little clout in the government and in the constitutional talks.

    Zarqawi's forces, sheltering in Sunni areas of central and western Iraq, are challenging the Sunni move into the political process with fierce determination.

    On Thursday, gunmen opened fire on a Ramadi meeting of political, tribal and religious leaders discussing the constitution. The local governor, leading western Iraq's heavily Sunni Anbar province, was at the meeting but escaped injury.

    On Friday, a Saudi insurgent leader, Abu Muhammad Hajeri of Zarqawi's group, was found dead in Ramadi with three Iraqi members of the insurgency. Sunni tribal members, speaking on condition of anonymity, said tribesmen had killed them.

    The killings were in retaliation for tribal deaths in clashes earlier this month, when Sunni tribesmen took up arms to prevent Zarqawi's group from enforcing an edict ordering the expulsion of local Shiites, the tribal members said.

    "Even for those [Sunnis] who want to resist, they are starting to see voting as a form of peaceful, nonviolent resistance," said Maj. Ed R. Sullivan, a U.S. military official in Ramadi. "That's a growing trend. The extremists don't want to see that."

    Separately on Friday, gunmen killed a city council member in the northern city of Hawija, police said. An Iraqi policeman died in an overnight raid in Baghdad, news agencies said.

    In Baghdad, U.N. workers lowered their blue-and-white flag to half-staff in the Green Zone to mark the second anniversary of the Aug. 19, 2003, bombing of U.N. headquarters in the capital.

    Knickmeyer reported from Baghdad. Staff writer Robin Wright in Washington, correspondent Jonathan Finer in Baghdad and special correspondents Naseer Nouri and Khalid Saffar in Baghdad contributed to this report.
    "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

  • #2
    Glad to see the story starting to get out. However, we'll see if it changes the op-eds at all, or if they remain Eeyorish with gloom and doom . . .

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    Los Angeles Times
    August 20, 2005
    Pg. 1

    Next Time, Sunnis Intend To Be Heard

    Many regret boycotting the parliamentary election in Iraq. They say they won't repeat the mistake when it comes to a new constitution.

    By Edmund Sanders, Times Staff Writer

    BAGHDAD — Suhail Najim spent Iraq's last election day holed up at home, watching television and joining other Sunni Arabs who boycotted the polls to protest the presence of U.S. troops in his country.

    Today the former tourism official is so eager to vote that he has visited three registration sites to ensure that his name is on the rolls for the planned October referendum on a new constitution.

    "It's such a huss and fuss," said an exasperated Najim, 56, after being sent from one polling center in his predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood in Baghdad to another one nearby. "But I'll go. I'll do it," he vowed, adding that leaders at his mosque had urged him to sign up. "This time I want to be sure to vote."

    In stark contrast to the Jan. 30 parliamentary election, when Sunni Arab turnout was as low as 2% in some areas, Iraq's once-ruling ethnic minority is mobilizing for a much stronger showing this time around.

    The January boycott, now widely viewed as a political blunder, left Sunnis underrepresented in the National Assembly and with a limited role on the committee charged with crafting a new constitution. Instead, both bodies have been dominated by Shiites and Kurds.

    Determined to regain some of their clout, leading Sunni clerics who once called elections under occupation a farce and condemned voting as an act against Islam, are using the same mosque pulpits to urge followers to register.

    Sheik Mohammed Salih, cleric at Baghdad's Bilal al Habashi Mosque and once a staunch critic of elections, Friday called upon "every honest and honorable Iraqi citizen to go to these centers and register" and then to "participate in the elections and referendum with enthusiasm."

    The Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's leading Sunni political party, this time is pushing an aggressive get-out-the-vote campaign, blanketing its newspaper and broadcast outlets with information about registration, lobbying tribal leaders, and passing out registration pamphlets door to door.

    Party officials are even pressing for permission to set up a registration booth in the Abu Ghraib prison, where they are betting that the votes of thousands of detainees — mostly young Sunni men — would go in their favor.

    "We are making a great effort to push people to register," said Alaa Makki, a senior party official.

    But the push is also drawing violent resistance.

    In Mosul, eight carloads of gunmen kidnapped three Iraqi Islamic Party members Friday as they were putting up voter-registration posters. After driving to a public square, the gunmen cursed the party officials as "infidels" and "defectors of Islam" before shooting all three to death in front of horrified bystanders, witnesses said.

    A day earlier in Ramadi, the governor of Al Anbar province and other Sunni leaders came under fire by unidentified attackers as they entered a mosque for a meeting about the upcoming election. Four were injured.

    In Samarra, Sunni neighborhoods have received dueling fliers from groups claiming to represent insurgents — some threatening to attack anyone registering to vote and others condemning the election but vowing not to harm civilians who participate.

    The Muslim Scholars Assn., a group of conservative clerics, refuses to endorse a vote as long as U.S. troops are in Iraq.

    "Our stand [on the legitimacy of elections] has not changed," said Sheik Husham Barony, spokesman for the group's Mosul chapter. "But this time we are leaving it up to the people to decide. We will not interfere with the decision to participate or not."

    Iraqi Islamic Party officials said they had been attempting to negotiate with Sunni-based insurgent groups, urging them to halt election-related attacks and trying to convince them that a strong Sunni turnout was vital.

    "We are trying to get them to stop the attacks, at least during the registration period, and show them that [voter registration] could even be helpful for the opposition," Makki said.

    At stake is Iraq's first democratic constitution in about 50 years. Political leaders have been debating the elements of the document, which is supposed to be finalized Monday and submitted to Iraqi voters for approval on Oct. 15.

    Although the draft is not yet complete, Sunni leaders say they will refuse to accept certain proposals, such as semiautonomy for the Shiite-dominated south or special recognition of Shiite religious leaders.

    To defeat a draft constitution, Sunnis would have to persuade two-thirds of voters in at least three of Iraq's 18 provinces to mark their ballots "no." If the Sunnis stayed home, the document would be likely to pass, since it would probably have strong support among the majority Shiites and the Kurds.

    Election officials say they are encouraged by the growing Sunni participation and are doing what they can to support it.

    When Sunni leaders broached the subject of registering Abu Ghraib prisoners late last year, the idea was quickly rejected by the election commission. Now the officials are considering it.

    "The commission is very serious about opening polling stations in areas where people couldn't vote last time," said Ezzuddin Mohammedi, chairman of the board of commissioners of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq.

    The commission, which launched a nationwide voter-registration campaign Aug. 1, does not track participation by ethnicity or religion, but early figures suggest some Sunni-dominated regions have gotten off to a quick start in signing people up.

    Among the four provinces that have received the highest number of registration forms, two have large Sunni populations: Salahuddin, home to Saddam Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, and Diyala, which includes the insurgent hot spot of Baqubah. The other two areas with high participation are the northern province of Al Tamim, which has a mix of Kurdish, Turkmen and Arab residents and includes the city of Kirkuk, and the predominantly Shiite southern province of Maysan.

    Security remains a hurdle in luring Sunnis to the polls, particularly in Al Anbar province. Violence and the U.S. military presence in Fallouja prevented more than half the city's registration centers from opening until this weekend, election commission spokesman Farid Ayar said. As a result, fewer than 150 people had filled out registration forms as of Wednesday. But Ayar said he expected a surge in the second half of the month.

    To address security concerns, tribal leaders in Al Anbar agreed to provide 20 guards at each registration center, and the U.S. military promised to steer clear of polling sites to avoid alienating potential voters, election officials said.

    Registration is scheduled to end Aug. 31, but Sunni leaders have requested an extension for areas that got a late start.

    Despite the threat of violence, many Sunnis vow to cast their votes Oct. 15, and say they regret the boycott of the last election.

    "I didn't realize the consequences," said Litfi Saad, 44, a contractor in Mosul, who was interviewed at a polling center. "Even if it's dangerous, it's worth the sacrifice" to vote.

    A Times correspondent in Mosul contributed to this report.
    "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

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