US military death toll in Iraq reaches 2,000

By Claudia Parsons and Andrew Quinn

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The U.S. military death toll in Iraq
passed 2,000 with the announcement on Tuesday that a soldier
had died in a Texas hospital of wounds from a bomb.

The unwelcome milestone was expected to spur new calls for
U.S. President George W. Bush to outline an exit strategy for
the Iraqi conflict.

Earlier in the day, final results showed that Iraqi voters
had ratified a new U.S.-backed constitution, despite bitter
opposition in Sunni Arab areas where insurgents are battling to
topple the Baghdad government.

The Pentagon said Staff Sergeant George Alexander, 34, had
died on Saturday of injuries sustained eight days ago when a
roadside bomb set by insurgents blew up near his vehicle in the
town of Samarra.

Bush said the war would require more sacrifice and rejected
calls for a U.S. pullout from Iraq.

“Each loss of life is heartbreaking, and the best way to
honor the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the
mission and lay the foundation of peace by spreading freedom,”
he said in a speech before the latest death was announced.

“This war will require more sacrifice, more time and more
resolve.”

In the Iraq war, which began in March 2003, more than
15,000 U.S. troops also have been wounded in action.

Casualties among Iraqis have been far higher, first in the
invasion and then the insurgency that elections and October
15′s constitution referendum have failed to calm.

Iraq’s Electoral Commission said 79 percent of voters
backed the constitution against 21 percent opposed in a poll
split largely along Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic lines.

Several Shi’ite and Kurdish regions voted between 95 and 99
percent “Yes”; in rebellious, Sunni Anbar 97 percent said “No.”

Prominent Sunni Arab leaders rejected the referendum as a
fraud, warning it could fuel militant violence and discourage
Sunnis from participating in future elections.

U.N. and Iraqi election officials said the vote, which was
largely peaceful despite widespread fears of a surge in
militant violence, was fair.

BLASTS

Anti-government insurgents, who struck in dramatic fashion
on Monday with a triple suicide bomb attack on a Baghdad hotel
used by foreign journalists, set off new blasts on Tuesday in
Baghdad and the normally tranquil city of Sulaimaniya, killing
at least 15 people in total.

Al Qaeda in Iraq said on Tuesday it was behind the Baghdad
hotel attack, according to a Web posting.

The referendum’s final results showed that only two of
Iraq’s 18 provinces, the insurgent stronghold of Anbar in the
west and Saddam Hussein’s home region of Salahaddin, had
mustered a “No” vote of at least two-thirds — one short of the
three provinces necessary to veto the measure.

The northern province of Nineveh, thought to represent a
third possible “No” due to its large population of Sunni Arabs,
ended up with only 55 percent of voters rejecting the charter.

Commission spokesman Farid Ayar rejected suggestions that
results had been tampered with. “We didn’t invent these
figures. It took us a long time to get them,” he told a news
conference.

BOOST FOR WASHINGTON

Passage of the constitution is a boost for Washington and
the Shi’ite- and Kurdish-led government in Baghdad, paving the
way for a parliamentary election on December 15 that both hope
will mark Iraq’s emergence as a stable, federal democracy.

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 percent
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
Shi’ite- and Kurdish-dominated areas.

“Politics is linked directly to security on the ground. The
situation can only get worse now,” Hussein al-Falluji, part of
a Sunni team that negotiated the constitution, told Reuters,
describing the results as a fraud.

Another Sunni politician, Saleh Mutlaq, said the vote could
backfire on government efforts to defuse the insurgency by
persuading Sunnis they had no role in the political process.

A top U.N. election specialist, Carina Perelli, 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.”

But U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s representative in
Baghdad, Ashraf Qazi, said the poll once again demonstrated how
dangerously polarized Iraq had become.

Both the United States and Britain have sought to ease
Sunni fears by emphasizing that the constitution can be amended
after the new parliament is elected — an enticement for Sunni
groups to field candidates and make their voices heard.

Proof of insurgent anger was displayed again this week with
the bombing of Baghdad’s Palestine and Sheraton hotels, the
base for several international media organizations and a symbol
of the foreign presence in the capital since the 2003 invasion.

The bombings, which police said killed at least 12 Iraqis,
broke a relative lull in insurgent violence over the past two
weeks. Body parts were still strewn outside the hotel complex
on Tuesday morning.

On Tuesday, a suicide car bomber targeted a U.S. military
convoy in Baghdad, killing one civilian and wounding five,
police said. A roadside bomb exploded near a Baghdad hospital,
killing one person and wounding another.

In the northern city of Sulaimaniya — a Kurdish area
rarely troubled by the violence of the past two years —
another car bomb killed at least 12 people, hospital sources
said, while a separate bomb attack killed a politician’s
bodyguard.

(Additional reporting by Michael Georgy, Alastair
Macdonald, Waleed Ibrahim, and Hiba Moussa)