Iraq Sunnis Urge Charter Block, Mull Civil Disobedience

Wrapping up a two-day meeting in the Jordanian capital Amman on Saturday, September24 , Sunni leaders from Al-Anbar province sought the formation of a committee to collect five million signatures to block the charter, the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat reported Sunday, September25 .

"We are mobilizing Sunnis to vote down the draft if our demands were ignored," by the Shiite and Kurdish blocs, Ali Al-Sadoun, a Sunni politician and member of the Iraqi Council for National Dialogue (CND), told the mass-circulation daily.

The final draft of the new constitution has been handed over to the UN for printing and distribution after being endorsed by the Shiites and Kurds, who hold a sweeping majority in the parliament.

Sunnis are basically opposed to the inclusion of federalism in the new charter because they believe it will divide Iraq and exclude them from sharing in oil wealth, as reserves are concentrated mainly in the Kurdish north and Shiite south.

"I firmly believe that the draft will be blocked in the referendum and we are working for this," Sadoun said.

Sunnis are a majority in Al-Anbar, Nineveh and Salahudin provinces and Iraq's interim law stipulates that the text fails if two-thirds of any three provinces vote against it during the referendum, scheduled for October 15 .

Civil Disobedience

The Sunni leaders did not rule out declaring civil disobedience if the US-Iraqi troops launched more "sectarian" attacks on Sunni towns.

"If our patience ran out, we would declare civil disobedience to protest these massacres," said Saleh Al-Mutlaq, the CND spokesman.

"Sunnis are the target of a genocide," he charged.

The gathering demanded the government compensate the people of targeted towns like Fallujah and Tal Afar for the damage they incurred in the all-out onslaughts.

The conferees slammed the destruction of entire cities like Fallujah, Al-Qaim and Al-Haditha under the pretext of rooting out foreign fighters.

The Iraqi army announced Thursday, September22 , the end of the "successful" Tal Afar offensive, which involved6 , 000Iraqi soldiers, backed by4 , 000US troops.

It said 157 "rebels" had been killed and 683 suspects captured during the three-week offensive.

Mohammad Rashid, the governor of Tal Afar, has resigned his post protesting the "sectarian operation" against battered northern town.

Timetable

The Sunni leaders blasted "awkward" US policies in Iraq and demanded a timetable for the withdrawal of US-led occupation troops to be replaced with qualified Iraqi troops.

"The people of Al-Anbar, whether men, women, children or elderly, will turn out in numbers to resist the occupiers," threatened Abdel Latif Hamim, one of the meeting’s organizers.

The US army’s chief of staff said on August 20 that the army plans to keep the current number of soldiers in Iraq, estimated at some140 ,000, for at least four more years.

The American people, however, are showing more discontent with President George W. Bush’s handling of Iraq, with high-profile protests and calls for an exit strategy.

Hundreds of thousands of American demonstrators took to the streets in several major cities on Saturday to protest the Iraq invasion and demand the withdrawal of US troops.

US Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has said that the longer the US stayed bogged down in Iraq, the more the conflict looked like another Vietnam War.

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