Kurdish leader Barzani exhorts Sunnis to renounce vote boycott 12.1.2005

ARBIL, Iraq, (AFP)- Iraqi Kurdish leader Massud Barzani on Tuesday exhorted Iraq's Sunni Muslims to go back on a decision to boycott landmark elections later this month.

"We do not want it to be said that the Sunnis have taken a political position consisting in boycotting the elections because this is not at all in the interest of our Sunni brothers," Barzani said.

The leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) made the remarks during a meeting with Arab Sunni tribal chiefs from Mosul, Kirkuk, Al-Anbar, Salahaddin and Baghdad.

Barzani said he asked them "to examine the reasons why Sunnis are boycotting the elections" and pledged to cooperate to help them overcome their position.

"No one knows the interst of the Sunnis better than the Sunnis themselves," Barzani said.

"We are in favour of elections and for them to be held on time, but at the same time we say that they must be comprehensives and we do not support elections which marginalise a large faction of the Iraqi people," Barzani said.

Iraq's influential Committee of Muslim Scholars, which groups 3,000 Sunni mosques nationwide, called for a boycott of the January 30 vote after US troops stormed the Sunni flashpoint city of Fallujah in November.

Their call prompted a similar decision by the largest Sunni faction, the Islamic Party.

But over the weekend members of the committee held talks with US officials and demanded a timetable for a US withdrawal in return for endorsing the election, a US official has said.

"We're not going to do that," the official told AFP on Monday.

Barzani promised his interlocutors to transmit their proposals to the interim government, the United Nations, the United States and Britain.

Meanwhile, Sheikh Thamer al-Duleimi, secretary general of the union of Iraqi tribes, said the meeting with Barzani was "a sincere invitation to encourage the Sunnis to participate in the electoral process".

http://www.krg.org/ 

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