Iraq Reaches Voting Deal as Toll Rises in Bombings/Legislators in Iraq Block a Deal on Election Law

Iraq Reaches Voting Deal as Toll Rises in Bombings
By ROD NORDLAND
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: October 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/world/middleeast/27iraq.html?th&emc=th


BAGHDAD — Iraqi officials reached a tentative agreement on a new election law on Monday, even as workers continued to recover more bodies from the wreckage of Sunday’s bomb attacks, including an uncertain number of children from two day care centers.

The toll climbed to as many as 155 dead, with more than 500 wounded and an unknown number still missing.

The violence appeared to have jolted members of Parliament into action: Calling the bombings an attack on the national unity government, Iraqi leaders swiftly responded with a compromise agreement on a new election law that had eluded them for weeks and threatened to delay national elections scheduled for January.

The Iraqi Defense and Interior Ministries began investigating security breaches that allowed the bombings to occur, Defense Minister Abdul-Kader Jassem al-Obeidi said in a statement.

The bombs were in a two-ton van and a minibus, which passed multiple security checkpoints on Sunday morning to reach their targets, according to Baghdad’s governor. Trucks are banned from Baghdad’s streets during daylight hours unless they have special permits that are issued by the military and checked at every roadblock.

“There was a ton of explosives in each vehicle, and the blasts were extremely powerful,” said Brig. Gen. Stephen R. Lanza, spokesman for the United States military in Iraq. “The crater was roughly 18 feet in diameter.”

Responsibility for the latest bombings was claimed on Monday by the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group that includes Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi group with some foreign leadership, according to a posting on a jihadi Web site, the SITE Intelligence Group said.

The extent of the damage was even worse than initially feared, with three major government buildings destroyed rather than the two reported earlier.

The first blast, from the van, which gutted much of the Ministry of Justice, did similar damage to the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works, located just across Haifa Street, a busy four-lane thoroughfare.

The second blast, from a Kia minibus, which happened a minute later, destroyed the Baghdad Provincial Council building a quarter-mile away.

At the first two government buildings, both seven stories high, workers were scouring the tangled debris of collapsed ceilings, floors and walls on Monday.

Iraqi official statements put the overall death toll at 99, but an official in the Ministry of Interior, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press, said it had reached 155.

There were conflicting reports of the deaths of children at the two day care centers in the Justice Ministry building, one for ministry employees and the other for employees of the Supreme Judicial Council. A police official stationed at the Ministry of Justice, Hussein Issa, said 30 children had been killed, but other officials said the number was much smaller. A final toll was impossible to determine Monday because so many of the children’s parents were still among the missing.

The Associated Press reported that 24 children had died.

Mr. Issa described seeing the day care center victims in a play area, which was close to the street when the bomb went off and knocked down protective blast walls.

“There were children killed in the swings, others who died right where they sat on the seesaws,” said Qusay Adnan, 33, a taxi driver who lives nearby and said he had helped Mr. Issa recover victims.

A Justice Ministry official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said that the deaths of five children at the ministry’s day care center and of one child at the judicial council’s had been confirmed.

The deputy minister of justice, Bushu Ibrahim Ali, said four children had died in the bombings.

The wreckage of the ministry’s day care center was directly opposite the bomb crater.

Mr. Issa became distraught as a black plastic body bag holding the remains of a small person was loaded into a refrigerated van on Monday. “Unfortunately, our government will not tell the real number of how many were killed,” he said.

Baghdad’s provincial governor, Salah Abdul Razak, said authorities had video images of the vehicles from surveillance cameras. The two-ton van was stolen from the water department in Falluja, he said, but he speculated that the bombs may have been assembled in the neighborhood of the ministries.

“Possibly there was collusion or negligence,” Mr. Razak said.

The umbrella group that said it had carried out the bombings had also claimed responsibility for a remarkably similar pair of coordinated attacks aimed at the Foreign and Finance Ministry buildings on Aug. 19.

The United States military announced that Iraqi security forces, along with American military advisers, arrested eight suspects on Monday in an investigation of a suicide bomb-making cell in western Baghdad.

The arrests occurred during an unsuccessful search for the cell leader, who is “allegedly associated with those responsible for the deadly bombing yesterday,” and who also staged the Aug. 19 attacks, a military statement said.

General Lanza, the American military spokesman, said that there still were fewer of what the military called high-profile attacks than in previous years.

“What’s gone down obviously is the frequency of the attacks, but the size and the magnitude of the attacks has increased,” he said. “As we get closer to the elections, the likelihood of this increasing is something that we are definitely concerned about.”

Iraq’s Parliament has been deadlocked over the election law, with as little as a week left to enact it in time to hold elections as scheduled on Jan. 16.

“What we have seen on this one is the resiliency of the government has not been affected,” General Lanza said. “The Political Council for National Security continued to meet yesterday to get an election law pushed through.”

On Monday night, that council reached a compromise on the wording of a new law that will go to Parliament on Tuesday for approval. The details of that agreement were not revealed.

After the August bombings, Iraqi officials arrested two men, saying one was a Baathist Party member and the other a Qaeda member, and televised the confession of one of them. They arrested police and military officers responsible for security lapses. No one has been tried yet.

Based on the confessions, Iraq accused Syria of harboring Baathist Party officials responsible for the attacks, and the two countries recalled their ambassadors over the matter.

Iraqi leaders on Monday renewed their call for the United Nations Security Council to appoint an investigator to study the role of neighboring countries in the attacks on its ministries.

Riyadh Mohammed and Mohammed Hussein contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.







Legislators in Iraq Block a Deal on Election Law
By JOHN LELAND
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: October 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/middleeast/28iraq.html?ref=global-home


BAGHDAD — The country’s political parties failed to agree on election laws on Tuesday, despite a proposed deal put together by the nation’s top political figures the day before. The stalemate was another blockage in negotiations that have dragged on for weeks, threatening national elections scheduled for Jan. 16.

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Iraq Reaches Voting Deal as Toll Rises in Bombings (October 27, 2009)

The official deadline for passing the election laws was Oct. 15. Elections can still be held on time if the parties agree on terms this week, but not much later, said Said Arikat, a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, which proposed guidelines to break the logjam among the parties.

“This is really crunch time,” Mr. Arikat said. “We have everything in place to conduct an election on time. With every passing day, it becomes more difficult.” Any postponement in the elections carries the potential for slowing the withdrawal of American troops.

Legislators said that they would continue to meet, but that they were far from agreement. “Yes, we’re closer than a week ago,” said Osama Nujaifi, a Parliament member from the Iraqiya bloc, who said he was confident that the elections would go forward as scheduled.

Iraq’s top political leaders, including Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani and their deputies, moved quickly Monday night to agree on a compromise in the wake of coordinated suicide bombings on government buildings on Sunday that appeared intended to stall negotiations.

Abdul Hadi al-Hassani of the Shiite Dawa Party said the bombings had added urgency to the discussions. “It makes us see the enemy, and all want to join together,” he said.

Members of political parties said there was broad general agreement on allowing people to vote for individual candidates, rather than lists. But the parties remained divided on legislation governing elections in Kirkuk, an oil-rich province to the north of Baghdad that has long been a point of contention between Kurds and Arabs.

Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish legislator, said he was critical of the proposal for Kirkuk, which would combine voting registration records from 2004 and 2009 to reflect the province’s changing population, which grew more Kurdish in those years. But he welcomed a United Nations proposal of using only 2009 records in the current election, then revisiting the question for future elections.

“It’s a great injustice to use the 2004 records,” Mr. Othman said, because many Kurds were driven from Kirkuk in ethnic cleansing campaigns under Saddam Hussein. He added, “If we don’t reach a solution this week, the election will be delayed, and we will have a constitutional vacuum after Jan. 16.”

The negotiations on Tuesday took place against the backdrop of an announcement by the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group of terrorist organizations that includes Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a mostly homegrown group that American intelligence says has some foreign leadership. The group claimed responsibility for the bombings Sunday and another recent attack and called Sunday’s attacks — in which at least 155 people were killed and several government buildings were destroyed — “the second stage of the good harvest plan.”

On Monday the Iraqi military arrested eight members of a terrorist cell it said was involved in the bombings Sunday as well as a similar attack on the Foreign Ministry in August.

As the party members debated election laws, Baghdad’s governor, Salah Abdul Razzaq, called for the firing of the interior minister and the operations commander over the recent bombings, which he said resulted from negligence.

Also on Tuesday, in the northern province of Nineveh, American forces killed a civilian during a raid, and gunmen killed two civilians in separate episodes.

Mohammed Hussein contributed reporting.