Iraq’s leaders have just months to mend their differences or see their country collapse, the speaker of parliament told wrangling deputies on Wednesday after a car bomb caused dozens of casualties at the morning rush hour.
Ethnic Kurds in the chamber demanded a new national flag to end a row over the Saddam-era version that has raised talk of Kurdish secession. But some members complained parliament’s agenda, on its first full session after a summer recess, failed to address urgent issues that may affect the nation’s survival.
Silencing one angry dissenter, Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani told the assembly: “Let’s start talking the same language.
“We have three to four months to reconcile with each other,” Mashhadani, a Sunni Arab, said of a national reconciliation aimed at averting ethnic and sectarian civil war.
“If the country doesn’t survive this, it will go under.”
Parliament did little at its first session on Tuesday but formally extend by a month the prime minister’s emergency powers over a country where statistics suggest about 100 people a day are being killed in insurgent and death squad violence.
Bombs, kidnappings, murders
Eight people were killed and at least 38 wounded when a car bomb blasted a busy road in the mainly Shiite Qahira district of northern Baghdad at the morning rush hour, said police, who also fear a surge in violence later this week when hundreds of thousands of Shiites mark a religious festival.
Another 19 bodies were counted up in various parts of the capital on Tuesday, police said, some of them bound and blindfold -- typical victims of sectarian kidnaps and murders.
U.S. and Iraqi leaders say the continued build-up of Iraq’s new, U.S.-trained security forces is key to stemming the bloodshed and letting foreign troops go home.
After what a U.S. official called an “embarrassing” delay at the weekend, an Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman said a formal handover of command of Iraqi forces from the U.S. military to the government would take place “in the coming days.”
Spokesman Muhammad al-Askari said a dispute over the wording of a document outlining the new working relationship between the U.S. military and the Iraqi armed forces had been resolved.
Among pressing challenges parliament faces are deadlines in the coming weeks for determining how regions can win autonomy from Baghdad under a federal constitution passed last year despite opposition from the once-dominant Sunni minority.
Many Sunnis fear such regional independence may give Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north an unfair share of Iraq’s main oilfields.
Kurds: No secession plans
Kurdish leaders, including Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani, have insisted this week that they have no plans to secede -- a move that would be opposed by their U.S. allies as well as neighboring Turkey, Iran and Syria.
But an order by the Kurdish regional leader to ban the Iraqi flag in the north because of its association with Saddam Hussein’s oppression of the Kurds -- and a reminder by that leader that Kurdistan might one day choose to secede -- has sparked fierce debate over independence, and the flag itself.
A Kurdish member of parliament from the party led by Talabani proposed to the chamber that the government should be charged with commissioning a competition to design a new flag.
There was no vote, but the idea has already had support from Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s aides. Some Sunni leaders have spoken out against a change, however.