BAGHDAD, 23 January 2005 — The leading candidate in a Shiite alliance expected to dominate Iraq’s Jan. 30 elections said yesterday that majority of Shiites would not be dragged into a civil war despite a series of bloody attacks on them. Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, told Reuters in an interview that Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi was leading a campaign to try to divide Shiites and Sunnis but would not succeed.
“We are strongly standing in the face of this evil plan and any sectarian sedition,” Hakim said. Hakim survived an assassination last month — a suicide bomb attack on his party’s headquarters which for Zarqawi’s group claimed responsibility. Hakim became SCIRI leader after his brother Mohammed Baqer was killed by a suicide bomb outside Shiites’ holiest shrine in the city of Najaf in 2003. In the latest attacks on Shiites, a suicide bomb at a wedding party south of Baghdad killed at least 12 people and a blast at a Shiite mosque in the capital killed 14 on Friday.
Hakim said these were all attempts to spark civil war. “It began with assassinating Mohammed Baqer Al-Hakim and it is continuing now with the attacks yesterday on a Shiite mosque and on the Shiite wedding,” Hakim said.
Many Sunni Arabs, who made up the backbone of the ruling class under Saddam Hussein, are boycotting Iraq’s first multiparty elections in half a century because of a raging Sunni insurgency they say will make a fair vote impossible.
