By DPA
Baghdad : Former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s Iraqi National List (INL) has withdrawn “finally” from Nuri al-Maliki’s government, a leading INL member told independent Voices of Iraq (VOI) Friday.
The Iraqi National List is a coalition of Iraqi political parties who ran in the December 2005 Iraqi elections and got eight percent of the vote and 25 out of 275 seats.
The most important part of the coalition is Iraqi National Accord of Iyad Allawi.
The INL will officially notify the head of government of its decision soon, after the government insisted on ignoring the demands it made in February 2007, INL member Iyad Jamal al-Din was quoted by VOI as saying.
The INL, which has five portfolios in al-Maliki’s government, announced earlier in August that it would suspend its participation in the government. The block threatened to withdraw entirely from the government if its demands continued to be ignored.
The INL’s demands include reconsidering the law on terrorism, filtering the army and police of “disloyal elements” and suspending the de-Baathification law for purging erstwhile members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, pending an enactment of a new law.
The INL portfolios included justice, communications, science and technology, human rights and a minister of state.
“The minister of science and technology, who belongs to the Communist Party, declined to quit, while the others agreed,” Al-Din said.