Baghdad, Iraq – The leader of Iraq’s largest Shiite political organization joined the country’s most revered and powerful Shiite cleric Saturday in a strong public push for voter support of a new constitution, three weeks ahead of a national referendum.
Also, suicide car bombers killed five Iraqis in and near the capital, and the U.S. military said a soldier died in a roadside bombing Friday night in southeast Baghdad.
The death raised to 1,913 the number of U.S. service members who have died in Iraq since the war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
In Basra, the country’s southern oil hub and headquarters for Britain’s 8,500-strong force, an Iraqi judge said he renewed homicide arrest warrants for two undercover British soldiers who allegedly killed an Iraqi policeman trying to detain them.
The Britons were rescued from jail last week by British troops using armor to crash through the prison walls.
In a sign of continuing tensions and Iraqi fury over the British operation, Katyusha rockets were fired at U.S. and British facilities in the city Saturday, causing no casualties.
The major political development surrounded Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
His appeal to voters added a key voice of support two days after Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani also directed followers to back the charter.
“It is our religious duty to say ‘yes’ to the constitution and to go to the ballot boxes,” al-Hakim told more than 2,000 supporters gathered in Baghdad to mark a 1991 Shiite uprising brutally crushed by Saddam Hussein.
Shiite solidarity is essential if the constitution is to pass in the Oct. 15 vote.
If two-thirds of voters in any three of Iraq’s 18 provinces reject the document, a new government must be formed and the process of writing the constitution started over.
Minority Sunni Arabs are dominant in four provinces and could defeat the new charter should they vote “no” as a bloc in three of them.
On Saturday, Sunni clerics and tribal leaders expressed optimism they could do just that while gathered at a meeting organized to scuttle the charter.
