Iraq lawmakers again fail to approve election law

Despite a meeting of senior Iraqi leaders and U.S. and U.N. officials seeking a compromise on Kirkuk, members of parliament failed even to muster a quorum for Sunday's emergency session. Iraqi officials vowed to try again today, days after lawmakers were supposed to adjourn for a monthlong summer recess.

U.S. officials believe the elections, initially scheduled for October, are necessary for Iraq's long-term stability.

Sunni Arabs, formerly the country's elite, boycotted the last such elections, in January 2005, leading to the creation of provincial councils dominated by Shiite Muslims and Kurds. The absence of Sunni Muslims from local government helped strengthen the Sunni-led insurgency across central and northern Iraq.

A similar dynamic played out in Iraq's Shiite south, where anti-Western cleric Muqtada Sadr's populist Shiite movement skipped the 2005 vote and then grew angry over its political rivals' dominance in the southern provinces.

The stalemate emphasized the fissures and entrenched positions among Arabs, Turkmens and Kurds in northern Iraq, which often threaten to spill over into violence. Last week, a suicide bomber struck a Kurdish demonstration in Kirkuk and sparked ethnic riots that along with the bombing left 25 people dead.

As in other areas in the north, Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens are in a struggle for power in Kirkuk, where the late dictator Saddam Hussein's Baath Party expelled Kurds and settled Arabs over a 35-year period. The Kurds consider the city the equivalent of their Jerusalem, and wish to annex it to the semiautonomous Kurdistan region.

In turn, neighboring Turkey has vowed to protect the north's Turkmen population and considers the Kurds' threat to annex Kirkuk a provocation.

Parliament's protracted deadlock also revealed what Iraqi and Western officials believe is the reluctance of the country's most powerful Sunni and Shiite parties to hold elections in which they could lose to upstarts.