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| Iraq |
| Junior al-Hakim looks to win over Sunnis ahead of elections |
| 2008-10-07 |
| Rising Iraqi Shiite leader Ammar al-Hakim has extended an olive branch to rival Sunni leaders and tribes during a whistlestop tour of Sunni enclaves ahead of key provincial elections. Hakim, 37, the eldest son and heir of Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC) party, has been widely tipped to take over the reins of the powerful Shiite party which has 30 seats in Parliament from his cancer-stricken father. Under heavy guard on Saturday, Hakim and his convoy of two dozen Land Cruisers and an ambulance visited the Sunni strongholds of Samarra and Tikrit - home of executed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein - and Balad, a Shiite-majority town that saw heavy fighting against Sunni neighbor Dhuluiya. In Samarra, a holy city that gained international notoriety after its Shiite Al-Askari shrine was bombed on February 22, 2006, in an attacked blamed by the US and Iraqi government on Al-Qaeda fighters, he stressed the need for unity among Iraq's divided religious communities. "We came here to visit the imams and also to be in contact with our people and tribes in this province, and also to be in touch with the people of Samarra," Hakim told reporters outside the heavily damaged shrine. "We are here to renew the promise to continue the work of rebuilding a unified Iraq," said the soft-spoken leader in a gesture of allegiance with local Sunni government and tribal leaders who circled him. The mausoleum at Samarra's 1,000-year-old Al-Askari Mosque, whose famous golden dome was destroyed in the bombings and further damaged in June 2007, houses the remains of imams Ali al-Hadi and Hassan al-Askari. Although the mosque is also important to Sunnis, the site is especially sacred to Shiites. Many of the Shiite faithful in Hakim's delegation on Saturday turned misty-eyed, with some weeping at the sight of the mosque that is now under reconstruction with the help of UNESCO funds. Nobody was killed in the attack on the Al-Askari shrine but the incident sparked brutal nationwide sectarian violence that led to the deaths of thousands of people around Iraq. The violence that pitched Sunni Arabs allied with foreign-led Al-Qaeda fighters against Shiite death squads and militias has subsided since its peak in 2006. Experts have linked the decline in violence to the ethnic cleansing of areas previously populated by a mix of religious sects. |
| Posted by:Fred |