By Mussab Al-Khairalla
Reuters, 06 September 2006
Iraq's leaders have just months to mend their differences or see their country collapse, the speaker of parliament told wrangling deputies on Wednesday after a car bomb caused dozens of casualties in the morning rush hour.
Ethnic Kurds in the chamber demanded a new national flag to end a row over the Saddam-era version that has raised talk of Kurdish secession. But some members complained parliament's agenda, on its first full session after a summer recess, failed to address urgent issues that may affect the nation's survival.
Silencing one angry dissenter, Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani told the assembly: "Let's start talking the same language.
"We have three to four months to reconcile with each other," Mashhadani, a Sunni Arab, said of a national reconciliation aimed at averting ethnic and sectarian civil war.
"If the country doesn't survive this, it will go under."
Parliament did little at its first session on Tuesday but formally extend by a month the prime minister's emergency powers over a country where statistics suggest about 100 people a day are being killed in insurgent and death squad violence.
Eight people were killed and at least 38 wounded when a car bomb blasted a busy road in the mainly Shi'ite Qahira district of northern Baghdad at the morning rush hour, said police, who also fear a surge in violence later this week when hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites mark a religious festival.
Another 34 bodies were counted up in various parts of the capital over the past two days, police said, some of them bound and blindfolded, typical victims of sectarian murders.
The U.S. military says al Qaeda is the "primary instigator" of the Sunni-Shi'ite bloodletting, and on Sunday the Iraqi government trumpeted the capture of Hamid al-Suaidi, calling him the second most senior al Qaeda figure in Iraq and saying he had been captured some days before.
But senior U.S. military spokesman Major General William Caldwell told journalists on Wednesday that Suaidi had actually been in custody since June 19. Iraqi officials say information provided by Suaidi led to the deaths of 20 al Qaeda militants.
HANDOVER
U.S. and Iraqi leaders say the continued build-up of Iraq's new, U.S.-trained security forces is key to stemming the bloodshed and letting foreign troops go home.
After what a U.S. official called an "embarrassing" delay at the weekend, Caldwell said the U.S. commander would formally hand over command of Iraqi troops to Iraq's government on Thursday.
"Tomorrow is gigantic," Caldwell said of the significance of the prime minister taking charge of the nation's armed forces.
Iraqi Defense Minister Abdel Qader Jassim said a dispute over a text outlining the new working relationship between the U.S. military and Iraqi armed forces had been resolved. The government had sought more independence from U.S. control.
Among the pressing challenges parliament faces this session are deadlines for determining how regions can win autonomy from Baghdad under a federal constitution passed last year despite opposition from the once-dominant Sunni minority.
Officials in the dominant Shi'ite Alliance bloc said they had completed a draft of their proposals for a mechanism by which provinces can form federal regions.
It was broadly in line with wording removed from the draft constitution last year in the face of Sunni objections, an aide to senior Alliance member of parliament Humam Hamoudi said.
The legislation is likely to be hotly debated in parliament.
Many Sunnis fear regional independence may give Shi'ites in the south and Kurds in the north an unfair share of Iraq's oil.
Kurdish leaders, including Iraq's President Jalal Talabani, have this week denied any wish to secede -- a move that would be opposed by their U.S. allies as well as Turkey, Iran and Syria.
But an order by the Kurdish regional leader to ban the Iraqi flag in the north because of its association with Saddam Hussein's oppression of the Kurds -- and a reminder by that leader that Kurdistan might one day choose to secede -- has sparked fierce debate over independence, and the flag itself.
Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald, Ross Colvin and Ibon Villelabeitia in Baghdad and Warsaw bureau
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Citation: Mussab Al-Khairalla. "Speaker warns Iraq has months to avert collapse," Reuters, 06 September 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060906/ts_nm/iraq_dc
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