Al-Sistani backs Iraq’s draft constitution

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraq’s most influential religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, on Thursday urged his followers to adopt a draft constitution scheduled for a nationwide referendum next month, offering crucial support for a document that would give legitimacy to the fledgling Iraqi government.

Political observers had been watching to see whether al-Sistani would weigh in on the political process. Millions of Shiites followed his call in January to vote in the country’s first democratic elections, which gave Shiites a majority in the new government.

If two-thirds of the voters in any three of Iraq’s 18 provinces reject the constitution, a new government must be formed and the process of writing the document would start again from scratch.

Some Sunni Muslim clerics and politicians have urged their followers to vote down the document, complaining that they did not have adequate representation in drafting it. Sunni Muslims make up nearly 20 percent of the population and form the majority in four of the 18 provinces.

Meanwhile, violence killed about a dozen Iraqis across the country.

Two attacks occurred in the Niariya neighborhood in eastern Baghdad. In the first incident, armed men wearing police uniforms stormed the house of a Shiite Muslim family, witnesses said.

In a gun battle that followed, three men were killed and a woman was wounded as she ran from the house screaming that the armed men were criminals, not police. Neighbors said they did not know whether the men, who had two-way radios, were police or were wearing stolen uniforms. The attackers took a resident of the house with them as they fled the area.

An hour later just down the street, gunmen killed two Christian brothers and two other men as they drove to work. The slain men were guards for the former minister of Displaced and Immigrants under the interim government of Ayad Allawi, a spokesman said. Family members confirmed the deaths.

The attacks occurred in the same area where 24 children were killed in a suicide bombing two months ago, robbing a street of its next generation of young men. Neighbors expressed outrage at the Iraqi government, calling it a failure to protect them.