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BAGHDAD, April
10, 2006 (AFP) - Sunni Arab, Kurdish and
secularist leaders Monday emphatically rejected
Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari staying on in
his post, possibly sealing the embattled Shiite
premier's political fate.
The clear "no" to Jaafari -- blamed for failing to
curb sectarian bloodshed since the bombing of a
revered Shiite shrine in Samarra in February -- came
amid a renewed wave of violence that killed more
than 100 Shiites last week.
Jaafari's Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the
largest parliamentary bloc, made yet another bid on
Sunday to save Jaafari's candidature by setting up a
three-member committee to hold talks with the Kurds
and the Sunni Arabs.
The committee was mandated to talk to the two
minority groups without whose support a national
unity government -- as desired by the United States
-- is virtually impossible.
"We have sent a letter to our Shiite brothers
explaining that our position remains the same --
that of rejecting Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari's
candidacy," Thafer al-Ani, spokesman of the
Sunni-led National Concord Front, told AFP.
The National Concord Front has 44 seats in the
275-member Iraqi parliament.
Late Sunday, Iraq's Kurdish group in parliament also
rejected Jaafari's candidature.
"We have once again rejected Jaafari's candidacy,"
Kurdish lawmaker Mahmud Othman told AFP after a
meeting between leaders of the Kurdish coalition in
parliament and representatives of Jaafari's party.
On Monday, the secularist list of former premier
Iyad Allawi also joined the Kurds and the Sunnis in
rejecting Jaafari.
The election-winning Shiite bloc, which has 128 MPs,
lacks the overall majority in the 275-member
parliament needed to push through a nomination for
prime minister on its own.
A senior member of the alliance said the UIA would
meet Tuesday to discuss the latest developments.
Jaafari has been facing opposition even from within
the alliance, with numerous Shiite MPs demanding his
withdrawal, including Vice President Adel Abdel
Mahdi, who lost out narrowly to Jaafari in the
nomination race.
US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad expressed
confidence the deadlock would be resolved soon.
"Other parties (Kurds, Sunnis) have had objections
to his nomination. And they're talking about a way
out. They're doing that today, and hopefully they
will solve that in the next day or two," Khalilzad
told CNN on Sunday.
For the US, a national unity government holds the
key to an eventual troop withdrawal from Iraq, where
the US-led coalition forces currently have around
140,000 troops.
As the yawning political vacuum created over the
post of prime minister continues nearly four months
after legislative elections, Iraq remains engulfed
in a deadly wave of sectarian violence.
More than 100 Shiites died last week in a series of
bombings, some of them targeted at their religious
sites in a bid to stir more sectarian killings
between Iraq's dominant community and the Sunni
Arabs.
The worst was the triple bombings at a popular
Baghdad Shiite mosque that killed 90 worshippers as
they stepped out of the sanctuary after the weekly
Friday prayers.
Five gunmen on Monday stormed the house of a Shiite
family in southern Baghdad's Al-Dura neighbourhood
and shot dead three members -- two parents and their
son -- in broad daylight, an interior ministry
official said.
On Sunday, 14 people were killed in a series of
bombings and shootings.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and a senior Iraqi
minister have declared that Iraq was in a state of
civil war.
"On a daily basis Shia, Sunni, Kurds and Christians
are being killed and the only undeclared thing is
that a civil war has not been officially announced
by the parties involved," Iraq's Deputy Interior
Minister Hussein Ali Kamal said.
Mubarak said in an interview with Dubai-based Al-Arabiya
television Saturday "there is effectively a civil
war underway now."
But an angry Iraq hit back at Mubarak, who also
enflamed Shiites across the region when he said
their loyalties lay first with Shiite Iran.
"The comments have upset Iraqi people who come from
different religious and ethnic backgrounds and have
astonished and dismayed the Iraqi government," said
Jaafari.
President Jalal Talabani said the "accusations
against our Shiite brothers are baseless and we have
asked our foreign minister to talk to Egypt about
this."
On Monday, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari called
his Egyptian counterpart Ahmed Abul Gheit and urged
him to "reduce the damage done by Mubarak's remarks
and help improve relations between the two
countries", a ministry statement said.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, whose
government was Washington's main ally in the
invasion, also backed Iraqi leaders, saying he
believed Iraq was not in a state of civil war but
that there was a "high level of slaughter."
Meanwhile, the interior ministry said on Monday it
had arrested "30 employees" of a Baghdad security
firm for planning "terrorist activities against
innocent people".
On the hostages front, German Foreign Minister
Frank-Walter Steinmeier hailed a video of two German
engineers held in Iraq as confirmation that they
were still alive.
A foreign ministry spokesman told reporters in
Berlin that officials had spent the night analysing
the video of Thomas Nitzschke, 28, and Rene
Brauenlich, 32, that was posted on an Islamist
website on Sunday.
In Baghdad, AFP said it had no news on the fate of
one of its Iraqi employees, accountant Salah Jali
al-Gharrawi, who was kidnapped on April 4 in the
centre of the capital.
AFP
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