BAGHDAD, 14 January 2005 — Poll fears in Iraq deepened yesterday as two aides to top Shiite leader Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani were killed in separate attacks apparently aimed at inflaming sectarian conflict among Iraqis already divided on whether Jan. 30 polls should go ahead.
A Sistani representative said yesterday gunmen killed cleric Mahmoud Al-Madaen along with his son and four bodyguards. Madaen, Sistani’s representative in the ancient town of Salman Pak south of Baghdad, was killed on Wednesday.
Another aide, Halim Al-Mohaqeq, a cleric working in Sistani’s office in Najaf, was also found dead on Wednesday.
“Sheikh Halim was found drowned in his own blood. Investigations are under way,” leading Sistani representative Hamed Al-Khafaf said.
Iraqi officials say attacks on Shiite targets in Iraq show Sunni insurgents want to inflame sectarian distrust, which divisions over the elections have already stoked.
Iraq’s 60 percent Shiite majority, oppressed for decades under Saddam Hussein, strongly supports the elections. A list of mainly Shiite candidates drawn up with Sistani’s approval is expected to dominate the polls.
Sunni leaders say that if many Sunnis regard the elections as unfair, this will spark more bloodshed and even civil war.
The reclusive Sistani, Iraq’s most widely revered religious leader, commands enormous influence in the country. Sistani has urged Shiites to refrain from revenge attacks. “Do you think that Shiite forces cannot storm into southern Baghdad and secure these areas? But we don’t want to hand our enemies the civil war they want,” a Shiite official said.
On Dec. 27, a suicide car bomber killed 13 people outside the Baghdad offices of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a major Shiite political party whose leader heads the main list of Shiite election candidates. A week earlier, twin suicide car bombings in Najaf and Kerbala killed nearly 70 people.
A car bomb targeting a Shiite mosque exploded near the town of Baqubah yesterday. Hospital sources said three people were killed and 16 wounded.
Insurgents have also killed scores of Iraqi police and security forces in the past month.
US and Iraqi officials have conceded that some areas of the country are still too unsafe for voting to take place there.
But Washington insists that the elections should go ahead on time and delaying them would hand victory to the insurgents.
“We want to make sure that there is as broad participation as possible in those elections. I think we all recognize that the election is not going to be perfect,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said on Wednesday.
Iraqi President Ghazi Al-Yawar said yesterday the election must go ahead as planned, despite urging the United Nations last week to look into whether Jan. 30 was a realistic date.
Yawar, a Sunni who has formed his own election list, has warned before that the vote would fail if attacks kept large numbers of Sunnis away.
Several leading Sunni parties say they are boycotting the vote because the results will be unfairly skewed against the Sunni minority that dominated Iraq under Saddam.
American officials also said on Wednesday the US force that scoured Iraq for weapons of mass destruction had abandoned the hunt.
— With input from agencies
