World

Iraqis Adopt Constitution

October 25, 2005 / 3:11 PM EDT / CBS/AP

Iraq's landmark constitution was adopted by a majority of voters during the country's Oct. 15 referendum, election officials said Tuesday. But a prominent Sunni politician called the balloting "a farce."

The U.S. military also announced the deaths of two Marines in fighting with insurgents last week in Baghdad, bringing the number of American service members killed in the war to 1,999.

Results released by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq showed that Sunni Arabs, who had sharply opposed the draft document, failed to produce the two-thirds "no" vote they would have needed in at least three of Iraq's 18 provinces to defeat it.

The commission, which had been auditing the referendum results for 10 days, said at a news conference in Baghdad that Ninevah province had produced a "no" vote of only 55 percent. Only two other mostly Sunni Arab provinces — Salahuddin and Anbar — had voted no by two-thirds or more.

The constitution, which many Kurds and majority Shiites strongly support, is considered another major step in the country's democratic transformation, clearing the way for the election of a new Iraqi parliament on Dec. 15. Such steps are considered important in any decision about the future withdrawal of U.S.-led forces from Iraq.

In other developments:

Two suicide car bombs exploded Tuesday in the generally peaceful Kurdish province of Sulaimaniyah, killing 12 people. Al Qaeda in Iraq, the country's most feared insurgent group, claimed responsibility for both in a statement posted on an Islamic Web site.

Iraqi and U.S. forces refortified a hotel complex where many Western journalists live in central Baghdad after

three suicide car bombs exploded (video)

a day earlier. Deputy Interior Minister Maj. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal told The Associated Press that 17 people were killed — most hotel guards and passers-by — and 10 wounded in the attack. In an Internet posting, Al Qaeda in Iraq takes credit for the attacks.

Insurgents used four bombs and seven shootings to kill six people a 7-year-old boy, two Iraqi soldiers and three policemen and wound 45 Iraqis, most policemen, officials said. A 10-year-old girl was among nine civilians wounded in the attack.

Militants shot a policewoman in the northern city of Mosul, police said.

Iraq's top two coalition partners in Iraq, the United States and Britain, praised Iraqis for adopting the constitution.

The White House called it "a landmark day in the history of Iraq," reports CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller.

Spokesman Scott McClellan offered U.S. congratulations to the Iraqi people for approving their constitution, calling it an encouraging sign that the political process in Iraq continues to move forward.
President Bush was expected to congratulate Iraqis later Tuesday when he speaks to military spouses at a Washington Air Force base.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, whose country holds the rotating European Union presidency, said: "The Iraqi people have shown again their determination to defy the terrorists and take part in the democratic process." He called the vote "an important step in the development of a democratic, stable and inclusive Iraq."

Carina Perelli, the U.N. elections chief, praised a "very good job" with the audit of results by election officials and said "Iraq should be proud of the commission."

Farid Ayar, an official with the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, said the audit had turned up no significant fraud.

But Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni Arab member of the committee that drafted the constitution, called the referendum "a farce" and accused government forces of stealing ballot boxes to reduce the percentage of "no" votes in several mostly Sunni-Arab provinces.

"The people were shocked to find out that their vote is worthless because of the major fraud that takes place in Iraq," he said on Al-Arabiya TV.

The militants kept up their deadly attacks Tuesday.

A suicide car bomb exploded near a regional government ministry, which houses Kurdish forces known as peshmerga, on the outskirts of the predominantly Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, killing 12 people, Lt. Col. Taha Redha, a peshmerga official, said.

About 45 minutes earlier, a suicide car bomb rammed into a seven-car convoy carrying Mullah Bakhtiyar, a senior Kurdish official in President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, said police Col. Najim al-Din Qader. The blast in Sulaimaniyah city wounded two of the convoy's guards and damaged two of its cars, Qader said. Bakhtiyar was not hurt.

Sulaimaniyah, 160 miles northeast of Baghdad, is where the PUK party is based, and is considered one of the most peaceful areas of Iraq.

The U.S. military said two Marines were killed by a roadside bomb during fighting with insurgents on Friday near Amiriyah, a village in western Baghdad. That raised to 1,999 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an AP count.

The vote on the constitution was 78.59 percent in favor of ratification and 21.41 percent against, the commission said. The charter required a simple majority nationwide with the provision that if two-thirds of the voters in any three provinces rejected it, the constitution would be defeated.

Some 9.8 million Iraqis cast ballots in the referendum, or 63 percent of registered voters. That was slightly higher than the approximately 60 percent turnout for January's legislative vote, which was boycotted by many Sunni Arabs.