BAGHDAD (Dispatches) – Iraq’s Fatah (Conquest) Alliance has blasted foreign-linked irregularities and fraudulence in the country’s parliamentary elections, warning that the results have to be annulled and new elections held if demands of the public are not met.
Mohammad al-Rabiei, Fatah member a spokesperson for the al-Sadiqoun parliamentary bloc affiliated with Iraq’s Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq movement, made the criticism in an interview with the Lebanese al-Mayadeen television channel on Thursday.
Rabiei said the Fatah Alliance had before the October 10 vote alerted the Iraqi Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) and the presidency to the existence of a “large gap” in the voting mechanism, and the panel had promised to work on resolving it.
“The suspicious events on the polling day and the obvious confusion following the poor performance of the IHEC revealed the existence of a massive manipulation of the election outcome, which led to the emergence of illogical results incompatible with the popular suffrage,” he told al-Mayadeen.
Rabiei rebuked the West and its regional allies for instigating chaos in Iraq, saying the aim of their plot against the recent elections was to eliminate the Iraqi resistance groups from their country’s political scene.
“The ominous triad of the United States, Britain and Israel, which does not want stability or security for Iraq, worked through Emirati funds and groups to remove the forces that rejected Western hegemony and stood as an impenetrable fortress in the face of normalization deal, occupation and disintegration,” the Iraqi official underlined.
Pointing to Western attempts to “break Iraq’s back” by weakening and dismantling the anti-terror Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), known as Hashd al-Sha’abi, Rabiei said the “dangerous manipulation” of votes which aimed to prevent certain candidates from reaching Parliament prompted the Iraqi masses to come out in the capital Baghdad and a number of provinces to express their anger over the results.
The Iraqi capital and a number of major cities have been tense over the past few days as several political factions and their supporters in the Arab country have rejected the preliminary results as “fraudulent.”
Tuesday was the last day to file complaints and appeals against the election results, with the IHEC having reportedly received about 1,400 appeals.
Two separate statements issued on Wednesday by Hadi al-Ameri, the leader of Fatah, and Qais al-Khazali, leader of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, said they would be waiting for the results of appeals submitted to the commission.