Baghdad, Iraq – With U.S. mediation, Shiite Muslim and Kurdish officials negotiated with Sunni Arab leaders Sunday over possible last-minute additions to Iraq’s proposed constitution, trying to win Sunni support ahead of Saturday’s crucial referendum.
But the sides remained far apart over basic issues, including the federalism that Shiites and Kurds insist on but that Sunnis fear will lead to the country’s eventual breakup. And copies of the constitution were already being passed out to the public.
Though major attacks in the insurgent campaign to disrupt the referendum have waned in recent days, violence killed 13 Iraqis on Sunday.
In one attack, masked gunmen in police commando uniforms burst into a school in the northern town of Samarra, pulled a Shiite teacher out of his classroom and shot him dead in the hallway as students watched from their desks, police said. A suicide car bomb killed a woman and a child in the southern city of Basra.
A U.S. Marine was killed by a roadside bomb Saturday in the town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, the military announced. It was the ninth U.S. death during a series of offensives waged in western Iraq seeking to knock al-Qaeda militants and other insurgents off-balance and prevent attacks during the upcoming vote on the constitution.
The death brought to 1,953 the number of U.S. military personnel killed since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003.
Interior Minister Bayan Jabr said the number of foreign militants involved in Iraq’s insurgency had fallen to around 900, from as many as 3,000 three months ago.
Their ranks have fallen because of casualties inflicted by U.S. and Iraqi military offensives but also because al-Qaeda in Iraq has started sending fighters to other Arab nations to build terrorist networks there, Jabr told the Arab daily Sharq al-Awsat.
As Sunni-led insurgents staged attacks to discourage Iraqis from voting, the government launched a campaign to persuade Iraqis to go to the polls, despite the threats and calls by some Sunni leaders for a boycott.
“The only way that Iraq can recover is done by concentrating on the political process, writing the constitution and participating in it,” government spokesman Laith Kubba said. “Any act that calls for violence or boycotting would deviate the country from its course.”
