Word: blocs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Monday, but was rescheduled for 11 a.m. Wednesday, and then pushed back to 3 p.m. Just before 4.30 p.m. the shrill bell calling lawmakers into the assembly chamber shrieked across the stained thin carpeting of the halls of the Parliament building. But senior members of the Sunni Tawafuk bloc refused to enter the session, leaving the Speaker with little choice but to reschedule the vote for Thursday. "We want our demands met, and they have not been," said Omar Abdel-Sattar al-Karboole, a member of Tawafuk, as the bell rang. (See photos of five years of U.S. troops...
...Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) has deeply divided Iraq's political factions. Proponents of the pact, led by Maliki's Shi'ite bloc and its Kurdish allies, emphasize that it reflects the fact that the Iraqi government has forced Washington to accept hard deadlines for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, and to make other concessions. Nationalist opponents led by firebrand Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr reject the agreement in principle, because it gives an Iraqi stamp of approval to the U.S. military presence in Iraq, which is currently authorized by the U.N. Security Council. The Sunni Tawafuk bloc, meanwhile, does...
...control of the Kurdish region. "This will create many problems over water rights, the delineation of borders, oil fields, mineral resources, this all needs to be considered," says Hashem al-Ta'ie, head of parliament's regional and provincial committee and a member of the largest Sunni parliamentary bloc. "Look at the problems between the Kurdistan Regional Government and the central government...
...vote, two grudgingly gave their conditional approval and one - the Minister for Women's Affairs, Dr. Nawal al-Samarrei - voted against the measure because it did not agree to put the pact to a referendum, a key demand of the Tawafuk Front. The front is the largest Sunni parliamentary bloc with 44 of the legislature's 275 seats. "If Tawafuk says no, that means the Sunnis say no," said party spokesman Omar Almashhadani. "We prefer that the U.N. mandate be extended or the Iraqi government agree to a referendum...
Whether al-Sadr's bloc of 28 lawmakers, coupled with Tawafuk's 44, vote for the agreement or not, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has the numbers to push it through. But his governing Shi'ite coalition and its Kurdish partners have made it clear that they don't want to do that without the approval of all of the country's main groups - Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds. "We are not prepared to approve this, the Shi'ites and Kurds alone," said lawmaker Redha Taki, a member of the Shi'ite Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. "By democratic means...