Iraqis OK 11th-hour amendments

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi lawmakers approved a set of last-minute amendments to the constitution without a vote on Wednesday, sealing a compromise designed to win Sunni support and boost chances for the charter's approval in a referendum just three days away.

The deal, brokered with intense U.S. mediation, came as insurgents pressed their campaign to wreck Saturday's referendum. A suicide bomber killed 30 Iraqis at an army recruitment center in a northern town where another bomber had struck just a day earlier.

At least one major Sunni Arab party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, said it will now support the draft at the polls. But some other Sunni parties rejected the amendments and said they would still campaign for a "no" vote.

Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani also weighed in, ordering Shiites to vote "yes" in the referendum, one of his aides, Faisal Thbub, said. It was the most direct show of support for the charter by al-Sistani, whose call brought out huge numbers of voters to back Shiite parties in January elections.

The most significant change is the introduction of a mechanism allowing Sunni Arabs to try to make more substantive changes in the constitution later, after a new parliament is elected in December.

Sunnis want to weaken the considerable autonomous powers the Shiite and Kurdish ministates would have under the constitution. But there's no guarantee they will succeed: They will still likely face strong opposition from majority Shiites and Kurds in the new parliament.

The amendments passed Wednesday also made some key symbolic concessions to Sunni Arabs, starting with the first article underlining that Iraq will be a single nation with its unity guaranteed — a nod to fears among the disaffected minority that the draft as it stood would fragment the country.

That was not enough, however, for many Sunni leaders.

"The added articles do not change anything and provide no guarantees," Muthana Harith al-Dhari, spokesman of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars, told Al-Jazeera television.

"We have called for boycotting the elections or rejecting the constitution," he said.

Still, the changes will likely split the Sunni vote enough to prevent them from defeating the draft constitution. The draft will be rejected if more than two thirds of the voters oppose it in any three of Iraq's 18 provinces, and Sunnis have the potential to do so in just four.