Iraq vote leaks suggest unity groups gain at expense of sectarian parties

LEAKS FROM Iraq’s electoral commission reveal that nationalist parties backing a strong central government seem to have triumphed in Saturday’s provincial council elections.

If this trend is confirmed, the main losers would be sectarian parties and federalists calling for devolution to provinces or semi-autonomous regions.

These include the Shia fundamentalist Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), which won control of seven of the 11 largely Shia provinces in 2005; the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, which dominated Sunni areas; and the Kurdish bloc which rules the three Kurdish majority provinces in the north-east and seeks to expand into Kurdish areas in neighbouring provinces.

In the north, al-Hadba List, comprising secular Arab nationalists and tribal elements, won a landslide in Mosul, the country’s third largest city, which has seen rising violence in recent months between Arabs and Kurds, as well as the flight of Christians.

Success in Mosul and other urban areas has, reportedly, given the List 60 per cent of seats in the crucial Ninevah province. Arab citizens of Ninevah resent creeping annexation of parts of the province by the Kurds and analysts suggest that if al-Hadba’s win is solid, Arabs and Turkomen could intensify their struggle against the takeover of oil-rich Tamim province and its capital Kirkuk by the Kurdish autonomous region.

In the western Sunni-majority Anbar province unofficial preliminary results indicate that the Iraq Awakening Alliance, the party established by Sunni tribal volunteers who fought al-Qaeda alongside US troops, and secular nationalists came out on top rather than the Iraqi Islamic Party, the victor in 2005.

In the Shia south, the Dawa (Mission) party led by prime minister Nuri al-Maliki appears to have increased its representation in councils formerly held by the SIIC. He won popular backing for taking a strong stand against militia violence and cultivating nationalist credentials for himself and his party, Iraq’s oldest Shia fundamentalist grouping.

Significantly, Dawa is said to have taken 50 per cent of seats in Basra, Iraq’s second city, and won in Baghdad, the largest. SIIC leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim disputes these reports and claims his Iran-founded and funded party is ahead in 11 of the 14 provinces that took part in the poll.

If the leaks are correct, Iraq’s political map has been dramatically changed by the provincial poll which seems to have restored power to local communities, encouraging them to fight for representation at the national level in the parliamentary election due in December.