Three government ministers who were already boycotting meetings of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Cabinet will formally quit the government, their bloc said yesterday.
The move by the secularist group of former prime minister Iyad Allawi deals a further blow to Maliki's efforts to rebuild a national unity coalition, which has been crumbling since the main Sunni Arab group and others walked out.
"The Iraqi List has decided to withdraw from the government and we will send a memo to the government to inform them of our stance at the beginning of next week," said a senior member of the bloc, Iyad Jamal al-Deen.
The bloc has five ministers in the government, three of whom were now quitting, while a fourth, the justice minister, had already resigned, he said. The fifth, a member of the Communist Party, was not participating in the walkout.
Jamal al-Deen said the bloc opposed the handing out of government jobs on sectarian lines and was now pulling out because Maliki had not responded to its call to end the practice.
GLOOMY PROGNOSIS
The announcement came one day after the declassified findings of a US intelligence estimate gave a gloomy prognosis for Maliki's efforts at reconciliation.
"Levels of insurgent and sectarian violence will remain high and the Iraqi government will continue to struggle to achieve national-level political reconciliation and improved governance," said the findings, which 16 US intelligence agencies agreed on.
The new estimate also predicted that security improvements made over the past six months will erode if the US military narrows its mission to supporting the Iraqi security forces and fighting al-Qaeda.
The US intelligence community "assesses that the Iraqi government will become more precarious over the next six to 12 months because of criticism by other members of the major Shia coalition" as well as Sunni and Kurdish parties, the new estimate warned.
The declassified judgments of the assessment were released by the office of the National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell.
NO COMPROMISES
Barring "a fundamental shift in factors driving Iraqi political and security developments," compromises needed for "sustained security, long-term political progress, and economic development are unlikely to emerge," the assessment said.
Iraqi leaders who are already "unable to govern effectively" will struggle to achieve national political reconciliation, it warned.
Changing the coalition's mission to focus on providing combat support for Iraq's security forces and fighting al-Qaeda "would erode security gains achieved thus far," it warned.
Just hours after the assessment came out on Thursday influential Republican Senator John Warner urged Bush to start a limited withdrawal of US troops from Iraq by Christmas.
The move would send a signal the Maliki administration and regional nations that the US commitment to Iraq is not open ended, said Warner, who returned recently from Iraq.
Meanwhile, 60 suspected al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters hit national police facilities in a coordinated attacks in Samarra, sparking two hours of fighting that saw three people killed and more than a dozen insurgents captured, police said yesterday.
MASKED ATTACKERS
The masked attackers drove into the city at dusk on Thursday in about 20 vehicles, including pickups with machine-guns, then split into small groups and assaulted four police checkpoints and a headquarters building, a Samarra police official said.
One policeman and two civilians -- a woman and an 11-year-old girl -- were killed in the fighting, and nine others were injured including a police commando and three children.
There were no details on insurgent casualties, but police arrested 14 suspects, the spokesman said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RELATIONS: Cultural spats, such as China’s claims over the origins of kimchi, have soured public opinion in South Korea against Beijing over the past few years Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday met South Korean counterpart Lee Jae-myung, after taking center stage at an Asian summit in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s departure. The talks on the sidelines of the APEC gathering came the final day of Xi’s first trip to South Korea in more than a decade, and a day after his meeting with the Canadian prime minister that was a reset of the nations’ damaged ties. Trump had flown to South Korea for the summit, but promptly jetted home on Thursday after sealing a trade war pause with Xi, with the two
RSS