Two Sunni Arab political blocs decided to boycott the Iraqi parliament unless the sacked Sunni speaker was reinstated, a source from a key Sunni bloc said on Sunday.
The Iraqi Accordance Front, a major Sunni bloc, decided in a meeting Saturday to demand that the speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani preside over the Sunday's parliament session.
"If our demand is rejected by other blocs, then the Accordance bloc will boycott the parliament," Salim al-Jubouri, spokesman for the Iraqi Accordance Front, told Xinhua.
The Accordance bloc, which has 44 representatives in the 275-seat Iraqi parliament, was joined in the boycott by the 11-seat National Dialogue Front, headed by the Sunni secular politician Salih al-Mutlak, Salim said.
Salih al-Mutlak has said that his front would not attend the parliament meeting, as the replacement of Mashhadani was not legal. On June 11, the parliament asked Mashhadani to step down and assigned his deputy, Shiite Khalid al-Attiya, to preside the parliament until the Accordance Front, to which Mashhadani belongs, names another nominee within a week.
The parliament move came after Mashhadani allegedly ordered his bodyguards to beat up a Shiite lawmaker on Sunday when a loud brawl occurred between them outside the parliament hall.
Earlier this month, a 30-seat Shiite bloc of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr boycotted the parliament sessions in protest against the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra on June 13.
(Xinhua News Agency June 25, 2007)
