Parliament’s speaker should be IAF nominee– Kurdish MP

Kurdistan-Parliament BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: MP from the Kurdistan Alliance Khaled Shawani said on Tuesday that the position of the parliament’s speaker should be filled by the nominee from the Iraqi Accord Front (IAF). “The KA believes that the nominee should have the ability to run the parliament,” Shawani told IraqiNews.com news agency. “The parliament’s chairmanship is allocated only to the Iraqi Accord Front according to political agreements reached after the parliamentary elections held in 2005,” he explained. On December 23, the Parliament accepted the resignation presented by Mahmoud al-Mashhadani during an extraordinary session after a heated debate erupted between al-Mashhadani and members of parliamentary committees over the issue of Iraqi Journalist Muntadhar al-Zaydi, who threw a pair of shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush at a Baghdad-based press conference last week. The Sunni Iraqi Accord Front has 38 seats in the 275-member Parliament. It comprises the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), the Iraqi People’s Congress (IPC), in addition to the Iraqi National Dialogue Council (INDC) and the Independent Bloc. SH (S)/SR 1