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ON MONDAY in Baghdad gunmen shot dead eight members of one family. To drive home their message of hate they cut the heads off some of the bodies. Against this bloody background, seven years after the US toppled Saddam Hussein, voters go to the polls to choose a government on March 7th in a vote most Iraqis hoped would continue their country’s uneasy progress towards democracy and political stability. But oil has been poured on simmering sectarian tensions by electoral bans on Sunni and secular nationalist politicians, raising fears the elections could reignite widespread insurgency and even civil war.

In the January 2009 provincial elections, a dry run for this year’s more important vote, secular and nationalist parties delivered a major blow to the Shia religious parties, especially the Iranian-backed Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (SIIC). But since then, largely at the instigation of Iran, a powerful new alliance of sectarian Shia politicians has come together as the Iraqi National Alliance (INA), combining the SIIC, and groups associated with Moqtada al-Sadr, former prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and Ahmed Chalabi, once the darling of US neo-conservatives.