Word: sistani
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...Earlier this week, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the largest Shiite party SCIRI, officially called for the creation of a Shi'ite region in the south after meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. What effect will this have on the process...
...will surely complicate things and possibly split the Sistani-backed United Iraqi Alliance. Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari's Dawa party, SCIRI's alliance partner, has opposed creating a Shi'ite region in the south. There is suspicion that Iran is behind Hakim's call because of fears that Iraq, under the new constitution, will have a weaker central government than it has now, meaning any Iranian influence via Baghdad will be curtailed as well. The proposal alarms the Americans, who never anticipated the emergence of an Iranian-influenced southern region. Iranian influence is widely perceived as one of the greatest...
...Kurds want to resolve such contentious issues as Kirkuk while their power is at its peak; the Shiites insist it should be done on the basis of a consensus achieved in the new Assembly. And the electorate that put the Shiites in power - and their mentor, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani - are unlikely to accept the legitimacy of any such far-reaching agreements achieved on this basis. Sistani himself never accepted the TAL, and urged that it be changed by an elected Iraqi body, not simply because its authors had been a U.S. occupation authority but because he rejected...
...winner on election day was the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), a mostly Shiite list assembled under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and led by moderate Islamist parties with historic ties to Iran. The UIA, which has nominated Dr. Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister, won 140 of the 275 seats in the Assembly, giving it the simple majority required to pass legislation, but not the two-thirds required under the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), the interim constitution bequeathed by former U.S. administrator J. Paul Bremer, to choose a government. That means the Shiites have to negotiate a deal...
...sticking point in negotiations between the Shiite and the Kurdish lists has been less over the makeup of the executive branch than over broad guarantees demanded by the Kurds for secularism and adherence to the TAL (which is rejected, in principle, by Sistani, among others) - and more importantly, over Kurdish separatist demands. The Kurds are using the kingmaker status granted them by the TAL to demand not only that they maintain the autonomy they have enjoyed for over a decade under the protection of the Allied ?no-fly? zone, but also that their domain be extended to include the fiercely...