BAGHDAD, 27 July 2005 — An early draft of Iraq’s new constitution suggested Islam will play a key role in the country’s basic law, as an Al-Qaeda linked group yesterday released footage of two kidnapped Algerian diplomats, saying it will kill them.
Separately, 12 Iraqi water purification plant workers were shot dead and 23 wounded in an ambush just outside Baghdad.
Five cars carrying gunmen attacked three buses filled with workers from the Al-Faris water works, located some 30 kilometers (18 miles) west of Baghdad, survivors said.
The masked gunmen boarded the buses and opened fire with automatic weapons, said one of the survivors, Ahmed Dhiya, 30, who was shot in the arm and shoulder. Another survivor, Amjed Naji, said US armored vehicles were on a bridge nearby but did not intervene. Naji was unscathed in the attack.
The US military was not immediately able to confirm the report. After the gunmen fled, the bus drivers, who survived, drove the vehicles to the nearby Abu Ghraib hospital, survivors said.
Three Iraqi police were killed and five wounded in a mortar attack on a control point on the road between Baghdad and Hilla, local reports said late yesterday. And an Iraqi soldier was killed and four were wounded when their vehicle was hit by a roadside mine north of Kirkuk, the reports said.
Meanwhile a former functionary of the Shiite organization Office of Al-Sadr Martyr was shot dead in his vehicle by unknown attackers in Bakuba, reports said. The man, named as Saad Al-Abadi, was also a former member of the Shiite Al-Madhi Army.
Amid the violence, the government mouthpiece, Al-Sabah, published what it described as a proposed draft of the constitution.
The text read that “Islam is the official religion of the state,” and “No law that contradicts the universally agreed tenets of Islam may be enacted.”
The Iraqi Parliament is to vote on a draft constitution by Aug. 15 before it goes to a national referendum in October. The draft however is still under discussion.
Sunni Arab members of the constitutional committee announced they were ending their boycott of the proceedings, called in protest at the killing of two of their colleagues last week.
The boycott had threatened to derail the constitutional talks.
The Sunni community, about one-fifth of Iraq’s 27-million population, was dominant under Saddam Hussein’s regime and is under-represented in Parliament. Their absence threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the document.
Meanwhile, the group of Al-Qaeda frontman in Iraq, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, released a video on a website of the two Algerian diplomats it kidnapped on Thursday, saying they would execute them.
The Organization of Al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers showed separate clips of the blindfolded diplomats, who stated their names and personal details.
The group earlier claimed responsibility for kidnapping and executing Egypt’s envoy to Baghdad.
In other developments, Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka and several of his ministers visited Baghdad yesterday for talks with Iraqi premier Ibrahim Jaafari.
With 1,400 troops, Poland has the third largest military contingent in the US-led coalition in Iraq. Polish commanders are also in charge of a multinational contingent of around 4,000.
Belka, whose visit comes a day after that of Australian Prime Minister John Howard, said Warsaw was determined to keep its military contingent in Iraq, although he suggested they may focus on training once stability returns to Iraq.
In other violence a former general in Saddam’s regime was killed in a drive-by shooting in the northern town of Al-Sarqat late Monday, officials said.
Two Iraqi security personnel were killed and three wounded by mortar fire near Baiji while guarding an oil pipeline yesterday, police said. And two Iraqi soldiers were killed by a bombing in the center of Samarra.
Also yesterday Iraqi Defense Minister Saadun Al-Dulaimi said most of the car bombs used in Iraq were smuggled in from neighboring Syria. “We have proof of terrorist infiltration along three points of the Syrian border,” Dulaimi told reporters.
“If the Iraqi volcano explodes, Damascus will be the first place hit by lava,” he warned.
A senior US military commander in Baghdad, for his part, recently said that the average distance between car bomb assembly points and their targets was about 10 kilometers.
Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Walid Muallem recently said Damascus had enacted “extraordinary measures” to prevent infiltrations into Iraq, but said no country could fully seal its borders.
