The US military death toll in the 2½-year Iraq war has reached the milestone of 2,000 with the announcement by the Pentagon yesterday of the death of a US soldier at a hospital in Texas over the weekend.
The announcement was made as Iraqi voters adopted the country's new constitution in spite of heavy opposition in Sunni Arab areas.
The result, announced yesterday by Iraqi and United Nations officials, was delayed by more than a week after officials said preliminary results showed an "unusually high" number of Yes votes but, after checking, the election commission said it was satisfied the constitution had passed.
The results underlined Iraq's growing sectarian and ethnic polarisation, with huge Yes votes recorded from Shias and Kurds and massive No votes from Sunni Arabs.
In what analysts saw as a sign of anger at the Kurdish role in promoting a constitution that transfers power from Baghdad to the provinces, a car bomb killed nine people yesterday in Sulaimaniya, one of the main Kurdish cities. The city has been a haven of peace while tension has mounted elsewhere; many Iraqis from Baghdad and the south have been going there for holidays to escape the violence.
Iraq's electoral commission said 79 per cent of voters backed the constitution against 21 per cent who were opposed.
A national majority of more than 50 per cent was required to ratify the constitution. It could have been rejected if two-thirds of voters in three of Iraq's 18 provinces voted No. This happened in the largely Sunni Arab areas of Anbar and Salaheddin, but in Nineveh, which contains the mixed city of Mosul, only 55 per cent voted No, according to the election commission.
In Diyala, another mixed province, 49 per cent voted No.
Sunni Arab members of the constitution's drafting committee denounced the result as rigged.Hussein al-Falluji said: "I have just prayed to God that he will expose the truth about what is happening in Iraq. We all know that this referendum was fraud conducted by an electoral commission that is not independent."
Saleh al-Mutlaq, another member of the committee, called the referendum a farce and accused government forces of stealing ballot boxes to reduce the percentage of No votes in several provinces. He said the vote could backfire on government efforts to defuse the insurgency by persuading Sunnis they had no role in the political process.
"The people were shocked to find out that their vote is worthless because of the major fraud that takes place in Iraq," he said on Al-Arabiya TV.
Last week he said soldiers broke into a polling station in a Sunni district of the city of Baqouba in Diyala province and took ballot boxes heavy with No votes and that later results showed a Yes majority.
Meshaan al-Jubouri, a Sunni Arab member of the national assembly, said polling officials in Nineveh had informed him Mosul had voted No by as much as 80 per cent, while the commission reported a 50-50 split.
Carina Perelli, who heads the UN election team providing technical assistance to the Iraqi government, said she was confident the election had not been fixed: "The result is accurate. It has been checked according to the processes that we all follow when we have elections. Iraq should be proud of the election commission."
The result gives President Bush a political boost by paving the way for national elections on December 15th, the next milestone in his effort to show progress towards democracy in Iraq.
However, many observers fear the constitution will undermine Iraq as a state. It minimises the role of the army by devolving security to local militias, is obscure about who is in charge of taxation, leaves oil revenues to the provinces and allows local religious authorities the final say on family matters. The state will have control only over "current" oil production; future development can be sold to foreign companies.
Politicians are racing to form the alliances that will shape the new parliament before a Friday deadline for parties and electoral coalitions to register for the elections.
Much will depend on Sunni Arabs, who represent 20 per cent of Iraq's population and have fought the charter as a plot to deprive them of power and access to Iraq's oil wealth in Shia- and Kurdish-dominated areas.
The results came as the US military death toll rose to 2,000, reaching the mark which was expected to spur new calls for Mr Bush to outline an exit strategy for the Iraqi conflict.
However, in a speech to military wives in Washington yesterday, Mr Bush said the war would would require more sacrifice and he rejected calls for a US pull-out.
"Each loss of life is heartbreaking, and the best way to honour the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission and lay the foundation of peace by spreading freedom," he said. "This war will require more sacrifice, more time and more resolve."
Anti-government insurgents set off new blasts yesterday in Baghdad and the normally tranquil city of Sulaimaniya, killing at least 15 people in total. AlQaeda in Iraq meanwhile admitted it was behind the suicide attacks that killed at least 15 people at a fortified hotel compound used by foreign journalists in Baghdad the previous day, according to a posting on the internet.