BAGHDAD, 24 September 2005 — Six Iraqi civilians were killed and 10 wounded yesterday in a bomb blast on a public bus in Baghdad as supporters and opponents of the draft constitution started in earnest to campaign ahead of the Oct. 15 referendum. Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, was to issue a “fatwa” or religious edict calling for a “yes” vote in the constitutional referendum, an issue which has sharply divided Shiites and Sunni Arabs.
“A fatwa will be issued within the coming days to encourage people to vote ‘yes’,” a source close to Sistani said in the holy Shiite city of Najaf. Sistani, who rarely speaks in public, was one of the driving forces behind the January elections, the first free vote since the downfall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, which saw Iraq’s majority Shiites and secular Kurds dominate Parliament.
The deadly bus explosion occurred in Al-Tayaran Square in central Baghdad, sending a plume of black smoke rising over the city, a day after US President George W. Bush warned that Iraq should brace for more violence in the three weeks ahead of the referendum.
“A man left a bag in a minibus shortly after he had boarded. It exploded just after he left,” a police officer said. Shopkeeper Nadhem Hassan said he saw a man “enter the bus and leave it very quickly,” adding that he saw six burnt bodies in the vehicle.
After a Pentagon briefing Thursday, Bush said: “As Iraqis prepare to vote on their constitution in October and elect a permanent government in December, we must be prepared for more violence.” Extremists are seeking “to set off a civil war,” he added. “Some Americans want us to withdraw our troops so that we can escape the violence,” he said. “I recognize their good intentions, but their position is wrong.”
Meanwhile, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has approved extensions of yearlong tours of duty of some 9,400 US troops in Iraq, Pentagon spokesmen said yesterday. The extensions, which ranged in length from a week to 10 days, will boost force levels in Iraq temporarily, but the main objective was to keep the force focused on security during Iraq’s Dec. 15 election, the officials said.
Sunni extremists have called for a boycott of the October charter referendum and threatened to kill anyone taking part, while most Sunni organizations have urged a “no” vote mainly because they object to federal provisions in the draft constitution. “We are against the way the power ... and natural resources will be redistributed,” he said.
“We think the resources should be managed by the central government in order to preserve the unity of the country,” Ayad Sammarai, the spokesman for the Sunni-based Islamic Party, told AFP yesterday. Most of the country’s oil reserves are in the Kurdish north and the Shiite south of the country.
Asked how a possible Sistani fatwa might influence the vote, Sammarai suggested it could further polarize Sunnis and Shiites at a time when Sunni extremists have been increasingly targeting Shiites. “It’s a political issue, not a religious issue,” Sammarai said.
In other violence, two US soldiers were killed and a third wounded in two attacks in western Iraq on Thursday, the US military said yesterday. Hospital officials in the main northern city of Mosul said they had received 10 bodies of men killed in the city. Police Maj. Mohammed Fahti said three of the dead were members of the Turkmen Front, a minority Turkish-speaking community.
Also in Mosul, the US military said it had arrested a “Tunisian terrorist” who claimed he was recruited while in a mosque in France to join the insurgency in Iraq, which he reached by passing through Syria. In the Iraqi capital, a Sunni imam, Sheikh Hamid Saleh Al-Mashhadani, was kidnapped from outside his mosque by armed men.
