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Baghdad (AFP) Feb 18, 2011 A popular member of Nuri al-Maliki's political party has stepped down as an MP, apparently over his unhappiness with a key supreme court ruling last month, an official said on Friday. Jaafar al-Sadr, the son of the founder of Prime Minister Maliki's Dawa party, submitted his resignation on Thursday after having been elected to parliament in the general election last March. "Jaafar al-Sadr resigned Thursday morning without giving a reason, but his resignation still has to be accepted by the speakership of parliament for it to become official," a source in the parliamentary speaker's office told AFP. The 40-year-old is the only son of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Sadr, who founded the Islamic Dawa Party in 1957 and who was killed by now-executed dictator Saddam Hussein in 1980. According to a source close to the ex-MP, "his decision was motivated by differences he had with the official line of his parliamentary bloc," led by Maliki. "Unlike Maliki, Jaafar al-Sadr strongly supports the independence of young institutions of the Iraqi state, like the Independent High Electoral Commission and the Commission on Integrity (the anti-corruption agency)," the source said. He was referring to a January 18 supreme court decision to link several independent bodies, including the election commission, the central bank and the anti-corruption watchdog, to Maliki's cabinet. Critics and the bodies themselves have opposed the ruling, which they say compromises their non-partisan reputation, but Maliki has defended it, saying that it was necessary that they be linked to the cabinet because their work was executive in nature. Jaafar al-Sadr, a cousin and brother-in-law of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, won the second highest number of votes within Maliki's State of Law coalition in Baghdad province in the elections, after only the premier himself. He undertook religious study in Baghdad, the holy Shiite city of Najaf and the Iranian city of Qom before earning a degree in sociology and anthropology in Lebanon.
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Two killed in rare Kurdish demo in north IraqSulaimaniyah, Iraq (AFP) Feb 17, 2011 Two young Kurds were killed when security forces opened fire to disperse an unruly protest in Iraqi Kurdistan on Thursday, as Iraq's prime minister warned that riots would not be tolerated. The protest and a similar rally in southern Iraq on Wednesday in which a teenager died were Iraq's most violent since a wave of Arab revolts broke out last month that have toppled the presidents of Tunisi ... read more |
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