Sunni province votes heavily against Iraq constitution

BAGHDAD, Iraq – At least one Iraqi province voted overwhelmingly against Iraq’s new constitution in last weekend’s landmark referendum, according to partial results released Saturday that demonstrated the sharp sectarian differences underpinning the vote.

The preliminary figures show that the constitution is heading for approval by a huge margin across the Shiite south and the Kurdish north of the country.

But in the majority Sunni Arab province of Salahuddin, where Saddam Hussein was born, 81 percent of voters rejected the draft, suggesting that Sunnis voted in large numbers against a constitution they widely perceive as favoring Kurdish and Shiite interests over their own.

With the ballots in four provinces still being audited in case of fraud, and these figures representing about half the votes cast in 13 of the 18 provinces, the sample is too small to draw conclusions about the final result, Iraq’s electoral commission said. There are still no results available from the 18th province, Anbar, because of communications and logistical problems in the insurgent-infested region.

The preliminary tally nonetheless indicates the extent to which Iraqis appear to have voted along ethnic and religious lines, despite a last-minute deal that was aimed at securing Sunni approval for the constitution.

In the eight Shiite provinces for which a partial result is available, in excess of 95 percent of voters approved the constitution, and in the two Kurdish provinces of Sulaimaniyah and Dohuk, more than 98 percent voted “yes.”

In the mixed province of Diyala, just northwest of Baghdad, where Sunnis and Shiites are roughly evenly distributed, the “yes” and “no” votes are running almost neck and neck, with 51.76 percent voting “yes” and 48.24 percent “no.”

If more than two-thirds of the voters in three provinces reject the constitution, it will be scrapped and the process of writing a new one will start over, something U.S. officials are anxious to avoid because they fear a repeat of the political uncertainties of the past year will only prolong the violence and delay the day when U.S. troops can start returning home.

With Salahuddin on track to reject the draft, and the troubled Sunni province of Anbar also expected to produce a “no” result, all eyes are now on Nineveh, the only other province in which Sunnis are in the majority.

Nineveh, home to the troubled city of Mosul, is one of the four provinces from which results are being audited after U.N. observers monitoring the count noted suspiciously high turnouts at some polling stations, as well as suspiciously high numbers of “yes” votes at some of them, election officials said.

Also under scrutiny are the Kurdish province of Erbil, the mixed province of Babil and the mostly Shiite province of Basra in the south.

Iraqi election commissioner Safwat Rashid said that no evidence of “significant violations” has so far been uncovered but that the audit is likely to delay the final result at least two more days.

Most Sunnis have already accepted that they are unlikely to be able to defeat the constitution, but any question marks lingering over the legitimacy of the result risk alienating them once again from the political process and boosting support for the Sunni-dominated insurgency.

In operations Saturday, the U.S. military said American troops and warplanes killed 20 insurgents and destroyed five safe houses during an action against militants suspected of sheltering foreign fighters for al-Qaida in Iraq near the Syrian border, the Associated Press reported.

Coalition forces raided two neighborhoods in Husaybah and discovered two large weapons caches containing small arms, ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds, explosives and bomb-making materials that included radios and detonators, the military said.

Soldiers destroyed a car bomb found near one of the buildings, and Air Force planes then used precision-guided munitions to destroy the safe houses, the military said.