16 coalitions meet Iraq election deadline
A Sunni Arab coalition has submitted its list of candidates for the December election, joining other political factions in the race and signalling greater Sunni participation in the process.
It has been six months since Iraq’s government took office April 28.
At least 16 coalitions as well as an undetermined number of parties and independents met the deadline yesterday of filing for the December 15 election, when voters select a 275-member parliament to serve for four years.
It will be the first full-term parliament in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed after the US-led invasion of 2003.
The election follows the October 15 ratification of the new constitution, which many Sunni Arabs opposed. Despite the failure of Sunni Arabs to block the charter, the decision by a Sunni coalition to participate and the presence of prominent Sunnis on other tickets indicated that many members of the community, which forms the core of the insurgency, have not abandoned the political process.
Political battle lines, in fact, have been drawn as before along ethnic and religious lines, a development that complicates nation-building in this factious, war-ravaged country of 27 million people.
The major blocs include a Shiite alliance built around two religious parties with ties to Iran, a broad coalition led by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, and the Sunni Arabs. Iraq’s two main Kurdish parties will run on a single ticket.
Allawi’s ticket includes several prominent Sunni Arabs, including Vice President Ghazi al-Yawer and Sunni elder statesman Adnan Pachachi, as well as the communists. It hopes to appeal to Iraqis fed up with religiously based politics.
But the ethnic and religious character of most of the tickets illustrates the sectarian nature of Iraq’s post-war politics. Following the collapse of Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime, majority Shiites and Kurds have been pressing for the power so long denied them.
Many Sunni Arabs believed the Americans and their foreign allies favoured the Shiites and Kurds, thereby fuelling the insurgency and triggering sectarian reprisal killings that have sharpened the religious and ethnic fault lines.
The US military said an Army soldier died of injuries suffered on Thursday when his patrol hit a roadside bomb in Baghdad. When other soldiers arrived, a second bomb exploded, killing another soldier, the military said.
In Saqlawiyah, 45 miles west of Baghdad, two Marines assigned to Regimental Combat Team 8, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward), were killed on Thursday by mortar or rocket fire, the military said.
That same day, an Army soldier assigned to the 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward) was killed when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb explosion in Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, the military said.
At least 2,010 members of the US military have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003.
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