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Sunni leader welcomes an alliance

An Iraqi walks past torn election billboards in central Baghdad yesterday, two days after more than two-thirds of voters turned out in the country's landmark election. PHOTO: AFP

A leading Sunni politician said on Friday that his party would be open to an alliance with secular Shiites and Kurds to form a coalition government to run the country once the results are in from this week's parliamentary elections.

"We will not accept the exclusion of any segment of the Iraqi people unless they themselves don't want to participate," said Adnan al-Dulaimi, a former Islamic-studies professor who heads a Sunni-Arab bloc that is now expected to have power in parliament.

In a joint statement, the two senior US officials in Iraq offered congratulations on the successful election and called for unity as the country approaches formation of a new government.

The statement by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and top US commander General George Casey, said "more needs to be done" to overcome differences to "build bridges for national unity and establish an effective, broad-based government."

"We urge all Iraqis to pursue their objectives peacefully through the political process," the statement said.

US officials view al-Dulaimi, who heads an alliance called the Iraqi Accordance Front, as a possible intermediary who could persuade some Sunni-led insurgent groups in restive Anbar province to join the political process after boycotting previous votes.

In an interview, al-Dulaimi predicted that Shiite religious parties would be unable to form a government -- even though they are widely expected to take the largest number of seats.

That would open the door to a coalition of Sunnis, secular Shiites and Kurds, al-Dulaimi said.

However, al-Dulaimi's prediction that the Shiites would be unable to form a government is by no means a certainty. Shiites account for about 60 percent of the country's 27 million people, and turnout in the Shiite heartland of southern and central Iraq was reported high.

Under the newly ratified Constitution, the party with the biggest number of seats gets first crack at trying to form a government than can win parliament's endorsement. That is likely to be the coalition of Shiite religious parties that dominate the outgoing government.

Still, a government with strong Sunni Arab representation could help defuse the Sunni-dominated insurgency and allow the US and its coalition partners to begin rem-oving troops next year.

On Friday, Casey told Pentagon reporters in a video teleconference that he will make recommendat-ions in the next few weeks about troop withdrawals from Iraq.

But he sought to dampen expectation that a successful election alone would end the insurgency and predicted insurgents may escalate their attacks to demonstrate they "are still strong and a factor to be reckoned with."

"We should not expect the insurgency to just go away because of yesterday's great success," Casey said. "But we should expect it to be gradually weakened and reduced as more and more Iraqis adopt the political process and the root causes of the insurgency are addressed by the new Iraqi government and by the coalition."

In an Internet statement on Friday, the Islamic Army in Iraq, a major insurgent group, said it was responsible for the absence of widespread election violence because it wanted to avoid harming Sunni-Arab voters.

"We knew Sunnis would participate in this game [because] most were forced to through the oppression, torture and destruction and suffering they receive from the slaves of the Cross [the Americans] and the Shiites," the statement said.

The statement added that the jihadist group did not believe in democracy, only God.
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