The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 70/No. 5           February 6, 2006  
 
 
Iraqi parties begin talks to form new gov’t
 
BY SAM MANUEL  
WASHINGTON—Sunni-led parties won a substantial number of seats in the Iraqi parliament. While charging vote fraud, officials of the largest Sunni bloc, the Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF), began negotiations with the Kurdish Alliance—part of jockeying for posts in a new government. Wealthy Sunnis who boycotted the elections a year ago organized a large turnout of their supporters for the December 15 vote.

Prior to the election, U.S. president George Bush said drawing more Sunnis into a new regime is a component of the White House plan to weaken attacks on U.S. and Iraqi government troops by supporters of the deposed Baath-party regime of Saddam Hussein.

Leaders of the main electoral bloc in the current administration, the Shiite-led United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), have also shuttled between Baghdad and the Iraqi Kurdistan capital, Erbil, to negotiate the shape of the new government.

According to Iraqi election officials, the UIA won 128 of the National Assembly’s 275 seats. The Kurdistan Alliance, led by the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), won 53 seats. The IAF won 44 seats and another Sunni-led bloc won 11. A bloc headed by Iyad Allawi, a wealthy Shiite and former prime minister in the U.S.-backed interim government, got 25 seats. The results are not confirmed yet.

The Kurdish alliance and the UIA formed the backbone of the cabinet after last year’s elections. This time the two are three seats short of the 184 needed to form a cabinet on their own.

Current Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, of the PUK, said there is agreement to form a “national unity government,” but striking a deal would be harder now.

One contentious issue is a provision approved last October in Iraq’s new constitution that defines the country as a federal state with a Kurdish autonomous region in the north and a Shiite region in the south. Sunni-led parties have opposed it on the grounds that Iraq’s vast oil reserves are in those regions.

Under pressure from Washington, the UIA and the Kurdish parties promised that after a new government is formed this provision could be reconsidered.

Offering an olive branch to the Kurds, an IAF official indicated that the Sunni-led bloc might be willing to accept a Kurdish federation in the north but not a Shiite one in the south. “The Kurdish federation is a fact on the ground,” said IAF leader Nassir al-Ani.

More contentious are Kurdish aspirations for control of oil-rich Kirkuk, just outside Iraqi Kurdistan’s border. Since the U.S. invasion, thousands of Kurds, expelled by Hussein’s regime before, have returned to the city.  
 
 
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