BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraqi voters have ratified a new constitution by a margin of nearly 4 to 1, election officials announced Tuesday as complete returns showed that the country’s disaffected Sunni Arab minority narrowly failed to muster enough “no” votes in three provinces to block the charter’s adoption.
The result, declared 10 days after a nationwide referendum, raised cries of protest from some Sunni leaders, who claimed the count was rigged. But Iraqi election officials and U.N. monitors said a selective recount turned up no significant incidents of fraud.
The nationwide “yes” vote was 78.59 percent.
Foes of the draft mustered a 97 percent “no” vote in Anbar province, the heartland of the insurgency, and an 82 percent “no” vote in Salahuddin, Saddam Hussein’s home province. But they fell short of the two-thirds benchmark in Nineveh province, which has a large Sunni population and provides a strong base of support for the insurgency, but also has a sizable Kurdish minority. The official count in Nineveh was 45 percent “yes” and 55 percent “no.”
Iraq has been run since June 2004 by two successive transitional governments under an interim constitution drafted in part by U.S. and British officials. The new, Iraqi-drafted charter calls for the Dec. 15 election of a National Assembly that will sit for four years and appoint a government that U.S. officials and many Iraqis hope can confront the insurgency more effectively.
Shiite Muslim and ethnic Kurdish politicians leading Iraq’s coalition government hailed the passage of the U.S.-backed charter, and President Bush declared in Washington that “the Iraqi people have once again proved their determination to build a democracy united against extremism and violence.”
But their message that the new charter would help isolate the Sunni-led insurgency was drowned out by guerrilla attacks, including car bombings that killed at least 12 people in Sulaymaniyah.
Also on Tuesday, insurgents killed six Iraqis and wounded 45 others in a series of attacks in Baghdad.
A video posted on an Islamic extremist Web site showed a U.S. soldier being shot in Iraq while guarding an armored vehicle. The militant Islamic Army in Iraq said one of its snipers killed the soldier in Baghdad on Monday, but the U.S. military said it could not verify the claim.
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