Sunni lawmakers on Tuesday listed a host of demands, ranging from sweeping political reforms to amnesty for prisoners, in exchange for supporting a pact to keep U.S. forces in Iraq through 2011, dimming Iraqi leaders’ hopes for a smooth victory when parliament votes on the measure.
The 275-member legislature was expected to vote today on the Status of Forces Agreement. The pact would alter the conditions under which the roughly 146,000 U.S. service members in Iraq operate.
Proponents, led by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, say it would put Iraq on the road to sovereignty by scaling back U.S. troops’ autonomy beginning next year and by setting a Dec. 31, 2011, deadline for a full American troop withdrawal.
Opponents, led by Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, say it doesn’t get rid of the U.S. forces soon enough and leaves loopholes for the Americans to do as they please.
The Sunni bloc, Tawafiq, holds 44 seats in the parliament and falls somewhere in the middle. It does not oppose the pact, which took nearly nine months to negotiate, but says it cannot back it without changes.
Al-Maliki’s Shiite bloc and its Kurdish allies hold enough seats to propel the pact through parliament, but al-Maliki needs Sunni votes to prevent sharpening the country’s sectarian and ethnic divides.
Rasheed Azzawi, a member of parliament from the Iraqi Islamic Party, one of the parties within Tawafiq, said bloc members would boycott today’s session if it did not receive promises its demands would be met.
“The most important demand is the political-process reform. We have demanded the Iraqi government not allow any side to monopolize decision-making,” he said, reflecting Sunni concerns of marginalization by the majority Shiites and their Kurdish allies in parliament.
Azzawi also said Sunni lawmakers wanted amnesty for detainees held in U.S. custody, who number about 16,000 and are overwhelmingly Sunni.
