Ammar Karim
Agence France Presse
BAGHDAD: Iraq’s electoral body warned Sunday that polls set for January will have to be delayed if procedures are not ironed out in the next two days, as a parliamentary vote on an election law was postponed once more. Lawmakers are deadlocked over the law that will govern the January vote despite intense lobbying from the United Nations and the United States, as well as pressure from Iraqi religious leaders and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
“We are entering a critical period,” Qassim al-Abboudi, a senior official in Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC), told AFP.
“We have told Parliament that if it is not possible to approve the law in the next few days, they have at least to provide the electoral commission with the system to be used, the number of seats and the quota for women and minorities.
“If time runs out without getting this information, then the election date will be in danger.”
Asked when time would run out, Abboudi said he did not want to give a specific date to avoid negatively affecting discussions in Parliament, but Faraj al-Haidari, the chief of the IHEC, said on Saturday that procedural details would have to be in place by Tuesday.
Stalemate over the bill has sparked concern that the polls, which were scheduled for January 16, will have to be delayed because the electoral authorities will not have enough time to organize them.
The electoral law is supposed to be in place 90 days before voting takes place. Constitutionally, the election must be held by January 31.
Lawmakers are deadlocked over the status of the northern oil-rich province of Kirkuk, an ethnically mixed region along the border with the autonomous region of Kurdistan.
BYCYCLE AND BUS BOMBS KILL 5 IN IRAQ
BAGHDAD: A bicycle loaded with explosives killed five people and wounded 37 at a market in Mussayab, south of Baghdad, on Sunday and a bomb on a bus killed at least three further south in Kerbala, police and health officials said.
The explosives in the first attack were stored in a water cooler attached to the bicycle, and women and children were among the dead and wounded, police said.
Mussayab, 60 kilometers south of Baghdad, is home to both Sunni and Shiite Muslims, but the town centre where the explosion took place is mostly Shiite.
Fifteen people were wounded in the second incident, hospital officials in the Shiite holy city of Kerbala, 80 kilometers southwest of Baghdad said. One of the dead was a policeman at a checkpoint toward which the bus was driving. Some police sources put the dead at five.
The attacks bore the hallmarks of Sunni Islamist insurgents such as Al-Qaeda, who often attack crowded, mostly Shiite areas, but many Iraqis also fear an increase in intra-Shiite rivalries ahead of parliamentary elections in January.
Violence has fallen sharply in Iraq in the last two years, but bombings and shootings remain common. Two suicide blasts in Baghdad last week killed 155 people and wounded over 500.
Iraq is due to hold a general election on January 16, and insurgents are widely expected to try to upset an electoral process that is taking place as US troops pull back ahead of a full withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. – AP
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