Western Resistance

The Daily Telegraph, in reporting the developments, stated:

One potent threat now facing the growing Sunni campaign to defeat the document at the ballot box comes from Abu Musab Zarqawi, the fundamentalist Sunni terrorist responsible for many of the worst outrages committed in Iraq in the past two years.

He and other leading groups have repeatedly threatened to kill any Sunnis participating in the political process and promised to bomb polling booths.

Last week three Sunnis putting up posters in Mosul calling on people to register were kidnapped, their bullet-riddled bodies later found dumped outside a mosque.

The Shias have threatened to push through the draft constitution, ignoring the Sunni's protestations, and have announced that the Iraqi people should decide for or against its final ratification in the October referendum, the Times reported today.

Human Hamoudi, the Shia head of the constitutional drafting committee, said that there would be no reopening of the most contentious clauses on federalism and that he did not believe that any agreement would be reached within the stipulated three days.

Instead, he said, the draft would be sent barely changed to Parliament, where the comfortable majority enjoyed by the Shias and the Kurds could be expected to vote it through. If the Sunnis did not like that, he added, they could simply vote it down in the referendum, scheduled for October. "The Iraqi people will rule," he said.

Other Shia negotiators echoed his hardline position, saying that the only compromise they could countenance was a retreat by the Sunnis. "The only possible change now is that the Sunnis become convinced on federalism," Jalal al-Din al-Sagheer, a Shia cleric on the drafting team, said.