RAMADI: A prominent sheikh and US ally is weighing whether to urge fellow Sunnis to boycott upcoming elections in protest of the government’s ballot purge of hundreds of candidates suspected of links to Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Such a call by Ahmed Abu Risha risks derailing Obama administration hopes that the March 7 parliamentary elections will bring stronger reconciliation between Iraq’s majority Shiites and minority Sunnis who want to reclaim more political power.
It would also set back the clock on Iraqi politics — using the same protest tactic that Sunnis used in 2005 Parliament voting that left them with only a few lawmakers and a weakened voice in key debates.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Abu Risha acknowledged that a boycott could throw Iraq into disarray.
But the Awakening Council leader said the candidate blacklist likely will result in a low turnout among voters in Anbar, the mostly Sunni province that covers most of Iraq’s western desert.
“They will not care about the election — they will ignore it, maybe, if these decisions stand,” Abu Risha said in an interview this week at his sprawling compound just outside Ramadi, about 115 km west of Baghdad.
“I will make my decision later about encouraging people to go to vote or not,” he added.
Abu Risha leads the Anbar province Awakening Council, a Sunni tribal militia that joined the US-led fight against insurgents in 2006. Anbar was the birthplace of the uprising against Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is seen as a critical turning point of the war.
Iraq’s government has banned about 450 candidates with suspected links to Saddam’s now-outlawed Baath Party. At stake in the March election is 325 seats and control of Iraq’s Parliament as the country prepares to stand alone when the US military leaves at the end of 2011. Iraqi officials say many Shiites also are banned from the ballot.
Meanwhile, a suicide bomber detonated an explosives belt Saturday at a restaurant popular with police in an Iraqi city that was once a flash point for sectarian slaughter, killing at least two people, authorities said.
The attack came the same day an Al-Qaeda front group in Iraq claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing Tuesday at Baghdad’s main crime lab that killed 22 people.
In Saturday’s attack, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a falafel restaurant in Samarra, 95 km north of Baghdad, a police official said. Twenty-five people were wounded, he added.
A medical official at the Samarra hospital confirmed the casualties, saying at least five of the wounded were in critical condition.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.
