IAF represents only IIP – MP

IAF-IIP BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: MP from the Iraqi National List Usama al-Negefi on Thursday said that the Iraqi Accord Front represents only the Iraqi Islamic Party after the withdrawal of several lawmakers and the Iraqi National Dialogue Council (INDC). “The Sunni bloc’s grip on the parliament’s chairmanship is considered to be marginalizing the rest of the Sunni lawmakers, because the bloc holds 20 out of 70 Sunni lawmakers in the Parliament,” al-Negefi told IraqiNews.com news agency. He considered the posts assumed by the IAF, like the vice president and deputy premier and a number of ministers, as bigger than its real size, noting that even the number of Sunnis the IAF claims it represents are few and represents only a small percentage of Iraq’s Sunnis. “The INL mulls the nomination of one of its members for the parliament’s chairmanship and will announce the name of its nominee next week in an official statement,” he explained. Spokesperson of the Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF) Sunni parliamentary bloc on Wednesday said that the meeting that embraced the IAF’s leaders stressed the Front’s right to fill the position of the council of representatives’ speaker, according to a release that was posted on the Internet. On December 23, the Parliament accepted the resignation presented by Mahmoud al-Mashhadani during an extraordinary session after a heated debate erupted between al-Mashhadani and members of parliamentary committees over the issue of Iraqi Journalist Muntadhar al-Zaydi, who threw a pair of shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush at a Baghdad-based press conference last week. The Sunni Iraqi Accord Front has 38 seats in the 275-member Parliament. SH (S)/SR 1