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 in October, 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.
In Amman, Jordan, about 150 Iraqi Sunni clerics and tribal leaders called for the rejection of the constitution, warning the charter would lead to the fragmentation of Iraq. The local leaders from Iraq’s insurgency-torn Anbar province, the country’s Sunni heartland, met for a three-day conference in the Jordanian capital for security reasons.
Meanwhile, violence killed about a dozen Iraqis across the country.
Two attacks occurred 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.
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