Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Sistani Urges New Gov’t with Broad National Acceptance, Army Continues Progress

Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Sistani viewed that “the inability of Iraq’s parliament to agree on a new government in its first session was a regrettable failure.”

“Last Tuesday the first session of parliament convened. People were optimistic that this would be a good start for this council in its commitment to the constitutional and legal texts,” his aide, Sayyed Ahmed al-Safi, said in the sermon.

“But what happened afterwards, in that the speaker and his deputies were not elected before the session finished, was a regrettable failure.”

Sistani also reiterated his call that the new government should have “broad national acceptance.”

This comes as Iraqi army drove armed terrorists out of late dictator Saddam Hussein’s home village, state media and police said, part of a campaign to retake wide areas of northern and western Iraq overrun by the rebels.
Pursuing a counter-offensive against the militants, government forces along with volunteers backed by helicopter gunships recaptured the village of Awja Thursday night, according to state media, police and local inhabitants.

They said that three insurgents were killed in an hour-long battle, and the main body of militant forces had fled south along the eastern bank of the Tigris River across from Awja.
State television quoted the prime minister’s military spokesman, Qassim Atta, as saying that Awja had been “totally cleansed” and 30 militants had been killed. No casualty figures could be independently verified.

The army said that it now held the 50 km stretch of main highway running north from the city of Samarra – which is 100 km north of Baghdad – to Awja.
Among the fighters Iraqi forces repelled from Awja were members of the “Naqshbandi” Army, made up of former army officers as well as loyalists of Hussein’s old Baathist party.

A spokesman for Iraqi counterterrorism forces said that government airstrikes have targeted a group of militants trying to overrun the country’s largest oil refinery, and added as many as 30 insurgents were killed.

Sabah al-Nuaman clarified that that a government plane targeted around eight vehicles attacking military forces defending the Baiji oil refinery north of Baghdad early Friday. Nuaman also mentioned that a helicopter gunship hit a house in the town of Qaim near the Syrian border where a gathering of the extremist group’s local leaders was taking place. He added that there were several casualties, but did not have a concrete figure.

Top US military officials, who have deployed advisers to Iraq to assess the state of its military, believe it will be able to defend Baghdad but struggle to recapture lost territory, mainly because of logistical weaknesses.

“If you’re asking me will the Iraqis at some point be able to go back on the offensive to recapture the part of Iraq that they’ve lost, I think that’s a really broad campaign quality question,” Gen Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in Washington.

Dempsey said that “the future is pretty bleak” for Iraqis unless they can bridge sectarian differences.
The president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region asked its parliament Thursday to plan a referendum on Kurdish independence.

Massoud Barzani’s call came days after Kurds and Sunnis walked out of the newly elected Iraqi parliament’s first session in Baghdad, complaining that the majority Shiites had failed to nominate a new prime minister.

In response, Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki rejected the move into disputed territories and a planned independence vote.

In a televised weekly speech on Wednesday Maliki vowed that the Iraqi army would return to the vast territories where the Kurds have deployed their Peshmerga forces, including the oil-rich city of Kirkuk that the Kurds have always wanted as a future capital.

“There is nothing in our constitution called self-determination,” Maliki said. “No one has the right to take advantage of events… as happened with some actions of the Kurdistan Region.”