BAGHDAD/BAQOUBA (AFP) - Iraqi plans to update an election law to adopt a more open voting system may fail because issues over disputed Kirkuk province remain unresolved, the parliamentary speaker warned on Monday.
Iyad Al Samarrai said MPs may have to fall back on existing legislation that utilises a more opaque process which only names electoral lists, but not candidates standing for office.
“Members of parliament will be obliged to fall back on the old law - that is the reality” if Kirkuk’s status is not resolved, Samarrai said in a statement on the website of the Islamic Party, a Sunni grouping of which he is a member.
He said Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk did not accept Kurdish claims of demographic superiority.
Iraqi Kurds have long striven to expand their northern territory beyond its current three provinces to other areas where the population was historically Kurdish, leading to a dispute with Baghdad over a tract of land centred around the oil-rich province of Kirkuk.
Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution calls for a referendum to decide Kirkuk’s fate, which Kurds have long wanted to make the capital of their autonomous north, an aim strongly opposed by the province’s Arabs and Turkmen.
Parliament is set to discuss the election law on Wednesday, ahead of nation-wide legislative polls on January 16.
Samarrai called on “all factions to find a solution” so that MPs could discuss the new law.
MPs moved this month to adopt the controversial closed voting system, which would list parties contesting the election without disclosing the individuals vying to take up seats in parliament.
The proposal triggered an intervention from Iraq’s top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini Sistani, who called for lawmakers to accept an open process for the elections.
More than 1,000 Iraqis took to the streets on Saturday to protest the move towards a closed voting system.
The UN’s envoy in Iraq on Sunday called on MPs to “clarify the legal framework for the elections in the coming week” and expressed concern the issue had not yet been resolved.
Violence
A spate of shootings and bombings across Iraq on Monday killed four people and wounded 13 others, police and military officials said.
American and Iraqi forces also said they had arrested an aide to Izzat Ibrahim Al Duri, the fugitive deputy of Iraq’s late leader Saddam Hussein, near Baqouba in Diyala province north of Baghdad.
In Monday’s deadliest attack, two sons of a mukhtar or village chief were killed when their car struck a roadside bomb in Buhruz, 15 kilometres south of Baqouba, the provincial capital.
Another son of Mukhtar Abdullah Salman was wounded by the bomb, an official from the military operations command in the city said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Salman himself was not in the car at the time of the blast.
Also in Buhruz, a separate roadside bombing wounded three civilians, the official said.
The two attacks sparked police to raid several houses in the village, leading to the arrest of 10 people.
In Jalula, 100 kilometres north of Baqouba, Iraqi and US forces said they captured Duri aide Iyad Jalal after American forces received intelligence as to his whereabouts.
“Iyad Jalal was caught by intelligence information from US forces,” said an officer, who declined to be identified, from the Iraqi police’s special forces unit which jointly carried out the arrest with American forces.
A US military spokesman declined to identify the person arrested, but said the detainee was “suspected of having ties with... [JRTN] networks in northern Iraq and has been distributing improvised explosive devices to terrorist cells throughout Diyala”.
The Army of the Followers of the Naqshbandiya Order, or JRTN from its Arabic acronym, is an insurgent group made up largely of former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and is active in northern Iraq.
One of the JRTN’s leaders is Duri, who is wanted by the United States, which accuses him of organising and financing the Iraq insurgency.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, a convoy carrying police Major General Mohammad Sabri, who leads a company of officers in the restive northern city of Mosul, struck a roadside bomb, wounding one policeman but leaving Sabri unscathed.
One civilian was killed by a bomb in the central shopping district of Karrada and four others were injured, police said.
Also in Karrada, a bomb attached to the car of Iraq’s federal police chief charged with diplomatic protection exploded, wounding him and four civilians.
And in Al Kisik, 30 kilometres west of Mosul, gunmen killed a local building contractor in a drive-by shooting, a police official who declined to be identified said.
It was not immediately clear why the contractor was targeted.
Monday’s violence comes a day after twin car bombs and an apparently coordinated suicide attack killed 19 people in the western city of Ramadi.
Though attacks in Iraq as a whole have declined dramatically compared to last year, violence in Mosul and Baghdad remains common.
Violent deaths in Iraq dropped by more than half in September compared with the previous month, official figures showed last week, with 203 people killed across the country, the lowest monthly toll since May.
