Insurgents on Sunday launched a concerted effort to disrupt an historic national conference in Baghdad when they lobbed mortars at the venue where the assembly was being held, killing two people.
Soon after delegates from around the country had begun debating, an explosion ripped into a taxi and bus stand a few hundred metres away. At least 17 people were injured.
The blast rattled windows at the venue for the three-day conference, a key step towards democracy and elections, but no one inside was hurt.
Opening the conference inside Baghdad’s heavily fortified ”green zone”, Iraq’s prime minister, Ayad Allawi, told about 1 300 delegates that the country needed to push on in its efforts to create democracy after decades of brutal rule under Saddam Hussein.
”Your presence here today is the biggest challenge to the forces of darkness that want to tear this country apart,” he said. ”This is not the end of the road, it is the first step on the way to democracy.”
The political and religious leaders gathered for the meeting will choose a 100-member assembly, or national council, to oversee the interim government until elections are held, theoretically in January.
But the prime minister’s comments were undermined by new fighting in the holy city of Najaf, and confusion over how his interim government intends to resolve its 10-day standoff with the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Explosions and gunfire rattled through the centre of Najaf again on Sunday as US troops in armoured vehicles and tanks returned to the streets. Dozens of explosions from tanks shells and mortars reverberated across the city’s vast cemetery, where fighters from al-Sadr’s Mehdi army have been hiding.
An American tank shell landed near the outer wall of the Imam Ali shrine, where the Mehdi militia has its base, killing one fighter, according to witnesses. ”The shrine was not hit,” Ahmed al-Shaibany, an aide to al-Sadr added.
On Sunday night Iraqi police ordered all journalists to leave Najaf. Four police cars surrounded a hotel where journalists were staying and presented the order, signed by Najaf’s police chief, Brigadier Ghalib al-Jazaari. Police said reporters who remained would be arrested, journalists said.
The renewed violence in Najaf followed the apparent collapse of talks to end the crisis. On Saturday Iraq’s national security adviser, Mouwaffaq al-Rubaie, said he had given up trying to negotiate a deal with al-Sadr, who has demanded that the US withdraw from the city and free his captured fighters.
”After three days, my government thought there was no use in continuing,” Rubaie said. Al-Sadr’s aides claim a deal was agreed, but fell through after Allawi torpedoed it.
The fighting in Najaf during the past 10 days has spread to seven other Shia cities in southern and central Iraq, and has severely dented Allawi’s credibility, in what has been his first big test since taking office at the end of June.
Al-Sadr and a leading Sunni religious organisation, the Muslim Clerics’ Association, both decided to boycott on Sunday’s conference in Baghdad, claiming that it lacked legitimacy.
”They call it a national conference, although it is not,” al-Sadr told the Arabic television network al-Jazeera.
The conference was due to open in late July, but was delayed after the United Nations demanded more time for preparations. Some delegates have accused the government of stacking the slate with Allawi supporters.
”The political parties in power now have the overwhelming majority of delegates. They left no room for independents,” Muhammad Bahr al-Uloum, a leading Shia cleric and a former president of the now defunct Iraqi governing council, said.
Another delegate, Nadim al-Jadari, of the Shia Political Council, on Sunday ran on to the platform and threatened to quit the conference unless talks were resumed to end the Najaf fighting.
Lieutenant Yasser Fawaz of the Iraq police said Sunday’s mortar attack had been intended to hit the high-security green zone.
Instead, it crashed into the bus station by mistake, he said. Two mini-vans that took the force of the blast were perforated with shrapnel. A large pool of blood lay nearby. Police officers took away the dead and injured in pick-up trucks.
Elsewhere in the capital there was more violence on Sunday as insurgents killed an American soldier in a roadside bomb blast. South of Baghdad, a Ukrainian soldier died in a mine blast, while a Dutch soldier was killed and five others wounded late on Saturday in an attack in southern Iraq. – Guardian Unlimited Â