Word: sciri
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...blow at the IGC - the Ayatollah's sanction would have been important in establishing the body's legitimacy. Ironically - and not necessarily coincidentally - last week's bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad killed Sergio Vieira De Mello, the UN special envoy who had persuaded the leaders of SCIRI to join Bremer's Council. Now a second voice supporting participation in the body has been silenced. The Baathists certainly have a vested interest in ensuring the IGC's failure - after all, they're fighting an insurgency against foreign occupation, but if the IGC takes root as the basis...
...Opposition groups ranging from SCIRI to the Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress are challenging Bremer's plan to elect a 35-member consultative body to advise him on political decisions, and have threatened to hold their national assembly in defiance of his edicts. But managing the competing claims of rival Iraqi groups amid mounting tension, fighting the Baathist holdouts while working to restore security and basic services are now part of the administration's daily agenda in Iraq...
...debate. Aside from the Kurdish groups, three of the "Five" were, until last month, based in exile and their standing among Iraqis is uncertain. Two more organizations may be added to this organizing group - the Dawa organization, a rival Shia Islamist rival to the Supreme Council, but like the SCIRI also backed by Iran; and a Sunni Muslim liberal democratic party. The question they're debating is how an assembly would balance representation of formerly exiled political parties with representatives of those who remained in Saddam's Iraq...
...political roles. But that view is challenged by the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, acting in the name of his father and uncle, both legendary anti-Saddam clerics murdered by the regime, whose agitation for the creation of an Islamic state may be anathema to Washington. Involvement by the SCIRI and Dawa in the process help give it a strong Shiite presence, but much may yet depend on the response of the Hawza to the national assembly...
...Revealing some of the schisms even among supposedly Iranian-influenced Iraqi Shiites, Muqtada is disparaging of SCIRI's Hakim. "The followers of Sadr don't like Hakim because he betrayed the people of Basra and the south when he urged them to fight (in the 1991 anti-Saddam intifada), and didn't come in to help them, causing the intifada to fail...