Iraqis Call for Delay in Election

BAGHDAD —  A group of leading political parties Friday called for a six-month delay of Iraq’s Jan. 30 parliamentary election, expressing concern that widening violence would make voting impossible in large swaths of the country.

The 17-member group includes Iraq’s two main Kurdish parties, which are key U.S. allies. Speculation about the feasibility of a January election has swirled for months, and increased last week when dozens of mainly Sunni Muslim parties endorsed a boycott of the vote. The boycott plan prompted fears that any new parliament would lack credibility.

Friday’s request is expected to put more pressure on interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and his U.S. backers to reconsider their refusal to postpone the vote.

In Texas, President Bush indicated Thursday that the United States would not support efforts to postpone the election beyond Jan. 30.

“The Iraq election commission has scheduled elections in January, and I would hope they would go forward in January,” the president told reporters during a public appearance near his ranch outside Crawford, where his family is spending the Thanksgiving holiday.

The debate over whether to delay the election could further divide Iraqis along religious fault lines, and even ignite sectarian tension.

Iraq’s Shiite majority, oppressed by Saddam Hussein’s regime and marginalized for much of this century, has been eager to seize significant power in the vote -- in which Iraqis will select representatives who will draft a new constitution and pick a president. Shiite religious parties have resisted attempts to push back the election, a position in which they find themselves increasingly isolated.

The powerful Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has pushed for a speedy election and launched a grass-roots get-out-the-vote campaign. His endorsement would be crucial to any delay.

After their Friday conference, the 17 party representatives released a statement declaring that a delay was necessary pending “changes in the security situation and the completion of necessary organizational, administrative and technical preparations.”

The meeting was held at the Baghdad home of Adnan Pachachi, an influential politician and the head of the Independent Democratic Movement, a Sunni party.

Organizers say they hope to build domestic and international consensus for a postponement.

“Now we must talk to the United Nations, the electoral commission and the government,” said Saad Abdel Razzaq, a spokesman for the Independent Democratic Movement.

Abdel Razzaq cited security concerns and a desire to bring boycotters into the process as the main reasons for requesting a delay.

“We want to take time to have a dialogue and convince them to join the process,” he said.

Allawi has repeatedly vowed to proceed with the election. On Wednesday, the prime minister declared the vote to be “on course.”

On Friday, there was confusion as to whether Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord party had endorsed the request. An INA representative attended the meeting, and the party’s name was listed among the 17 signatories.

But Hani Idrees, a member of the INA’s political bureau, said the party’s representative had not signed the communique seeking the postponement.

The INA continues to support the idea of January elections, Idrees said, but would be willing to support a delay if “there was a wide consensus among all parties involved.”

Abdel Razzaq, however, insisted that the INA had “signed and agreed” with the delay request.

Even without the INA’s assent, Friday’s announcement was a major boost for advocates of a delay.

Friday’s list of signatories is diverse, including Kurdish and Sunni parties, Christians, socialists, a tribal group and a women’s group.

A similar group of parties gathered last week for a conference in the northern city of Dukkan that lasted several days. After that meeting, only the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country’s largest Sunni religious party, openly endorsed a delay. Kurdish parties were noncommittal, several Shiite parties openly opposed the idea, and the final conference statement asked only that the issue be seriously examined.

An elections expert with experience in Iraq, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the endorsement by the two U.S. allies, the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, represented a crucial shift.

“The Kurds were weakly aligned with the Shiites toward elections on time. Now they’re weakly aligned with the Sunnis toward a delay,” the expert said. “There’s a fight brewing and it looks like the Kurds just switched sides.... This could get messy.”

The two top Shiite parties, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party, didn’t participate in Friday’s meeting. Nor did the Iraqi National Congress, whose leader is former Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi, who has sought to reinvent himself as a Shiite populist after falling out with Washington.

INC spokesman Entifad Qanbar, in an interview on the Al Jazeera satellite news channel, denounced the proposal, saying it would lead to a loss of faith in the fledgling political forces and embolden the country’s insurgency.

“Iraq’s problems can only be solved at the ballot box,” Qanbar said.

Hussein Hindawi, chairman of the U.N.-appointed Independent Electoral Commission, said Friday that the delay request would be studied.

Even if consensus for a delay can be reached, Iraqi authorities will have to find a way around Iraq’s interim constitution, which stipulates that elections be held by the end of January. The law, approved by the Governing Council and the former U.S. administrator in Iraq, excludes any mechanism to alter the date.

“It’s one of the few things that can’t be changed,” the electoral expert said.

But many Iraqis say the country’s rulers have no choice because insurgents have extended their reach over large sections of Baghdad and other mainly Sunni areas, making it unlikely that the U.S. and the Iraq’s interim government can establish the stability needed for credible elections.

On Friday, violence continued to rack Mosul, a city 225 miles northwest of Baghdad that was a stronghold of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. Insurgents have mounted a campaign there targeting members of the Iraqi security forces and others perceived as collaborators.

Associated Press reported Friday that 13 more bodies had been found in and around the city, bringing the number of corpses discovered there to at least 35 in the last week. Eleven of the 35 had been identified as Iraqi security officers, the news agency reported. The identities of the others remained unknown.

Mosul, Iraq’s third-most populous city, experienced an insurgent uprising three weeks ago after insurgents reportedly fled there as U.S.-led forces moved against the rebel enclave in Fallouja.

U.S. and allied Iraqi forces have moved to reassert control of Mosul, but clashes continue there and in neighboring Tall Afar, a city near the Syrian border that has also seen large-scale insurgent attacks.

The U.S. military announced Friday that two more Marines had been killed Thursday during the offensive in Fallouja. More than 50 U.S. troops have been killed and at least 425 wounded during the Fallouja offensive. U.S. forces are now searching houses in the city to ensure that insurgents are no longer present, commanders say. Some militants who are prepared to fight to the death have hunkered down inside houses and other buildings, waiting for U.S. forces to come to them, the military said.

On Friday, Global Risk Strategies, one of many international security firms working in Iraq, announced that four employees had been killed and 12 wounded in a rocket attack a day earlier in the heavily fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad.

A company spokesman said the casualties were Nepalese nationals. Private guards patrol many sites inside the Green Zone, a sprawling complex housing the U.S. and British embassies, the interim Iraqi government and other offices.

The Green Zone is a frequent target of rocket and mortar attacks, but the strikes only occasionally cause casualties.

Last month, two suicide bombers detonated explosives-laden backpacks in a cafe inside the zone, killing six people, including four U.S. citizens, and prompting a tightening of the stringent security rules.