By Edward Wong
New York Times
06 June 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 5 - Sunni Arab leaders are expected to present by Thursday a list of 25 to 35 Sunni Arabs willing to help draft a permanent constitution, an official with a parliamentary committee overseeing the drafting said Sunday in an interview.
The 55-member committee, dominated by Shiite Arabs and Kurds, the two groups that won big in the January elections, would then work with those Sunni Arabs to write the constitution, said the official, Bahaa al-Aaraji, a follower of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. The additional Sunnis would not have formal voting power to approve or reject the draft, Mr. Aaraji said. But he added that the committee would agree to approve only a draft reached through a consensus with the Sunnis. The committee, which has only two Sunni Arab members, is trying to work out a way to be more inclusive during the constitution-writing process. Sunni Arabs, who ruled Iraq under Saddam Hussein and are leading the insurgency, largely boycotted the elections and are underrepresented in the National Assembly. The White House has been urging the new Iraqi government to ensure that Sunni Arabs have a fair say in the drafting of the constitution.
Last Thursday, members of the constitutional committee met in Baghdad with about 70 Sunni leaders to discuss Sunni participation. The meeting lasted four hours, and the Sunnis agreed at the end to come up with the list of 25 to 35 names within a week, Mr. Aaraji said. Sunni Arab officials at the meeting included members of the Iraqi Islamic Party, Muslim Scholars Association and the Sunni Endowment, all powerful groups that wield influence, though no single voice speaks for a majority of Sunnis.
A draft of the constitution is due by mid-August. The National Assembly has the option of pushing back the deadline, as well as elections for a full, five-year government, now set for December, by up to six months. But American officials say they are pressing the Iraqi government to keep the original timetable.
Getting Sunni Arabs involved in the political process is seen as crucial to taking the edge off the insurgency. Last month was one of the war's bloodiest, with 80 American troops and about 800 Iraqis killed.
Attacks continued across central and northern Iraq on Sunday. One man was killed in Buhruz, northeast of Baghdad, when gunmen drove up to a car carrying a police officer and opened fire, an Interior Ministry official said. The officer, Maj. Muhammad Azzawi, and another man in the car were wounded, and the driver was killed.
Early on Sunday, gunmen sprayed the car of a policewoman in Baghdad, killing her, a police colonel told The Associated Press. On Saturday, a suicide car bomb exploded outside Mosul in the north, killing two policemen and wounding four. When more police officers went to help their colleagues, a roadside bomb went off, wounding four additional officers. South of Baghdad, in the Euphrates River Valley area known as the Triangle of Death, Iraqi and American troops made raids in insurgent-friendly towns as part of the offensive called Operation Lightning. On Thursday, about 10,000 Iraqi and American troops sealed off towns in the area, including the insurgent stronghold Mahmudiya. The next day, troops began going house to house looking for insurgents.
By Sunday morning, more than 200 people had been arrested, Iraqi commanders said. Troops met virtually no resistance.
In Anbar Province, American troops used 300 pounds of plastic explosives to destroy a vast underground bunker system and weapons cache, said Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a spokesman for the Second Marine Division. The series of bunkers was discovered by marines on Thursday afternoon and had furnished living quarters, fresh food, showers and even a working air-conditioner. It was the largest insurgent underground lair found in the last year, if not during the entire war, Captain Pool said.
In Washington, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Sunday in a telephone interview that military commanders privately told a Congressional delegation visiting Iraq last Monday that it would take about two years before enough Iraqi security forces were sufficiently trained to allow the Pentagon to withdraw large numbers of American troops.
"No one said you can draw down significantly in less than two years," Mr. Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said after returning from the visit to Iraq with half a dozen other lawmakers. "What these guys were saying to me was, 'We've got to level with the American people.' "
Mr. Biden said that military officials had told lawmakers that there were 107 Iraqi police or military battalions in uniform, about 160,000 men, but that only 3 were "fully operational," meaning able to perform largely independent operations. Twenty of the battalions were "partially operational," or able to perform missions in tandem with American units, while the rest were in various states of training, he said.
He added that American commanders had told him that the 139,000 American troops in the country were not enough to perform all the necessary missions in Iraq, including tightening the nation's porous borders, and that they were not expecting any sizable increases in American troop strength.
Addressing the readiness of the Iraqi forces, Brig. Gen. C. Donald Alston, the chief American military spokesman in Baghdad, said that "the Iraqi security forces have come a long way in a short time."
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Sabrina Tavernise from Mahmudiya.
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Citation: Edward Wong, "Dozens of Sunnis Expected to Help Draft Iraq Constitution," New York Times, 6 June 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/06/international/middleeast/06iraq.html?oref=login
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