**First results in south Iraq put Shias well ahead **
Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Friday February 4, 2005
The Guardian
Iraq’s Shia coalition dominated the national assembly elections in most of the southern provinces and it seems likely to be the strongest party overall, according to the first partial election results, covering 1.6m votes, released yesterday.
Election officials pointed out that the results did not not yet represent a national trend.
They show the United Iraqi Alliance winning 71.6% in the areas involved.
The interim prime minister Ayad Allawi has 18.1%; no other party has more than 1% or 2%.
As negotiations to form a new government began, a wave of insurgent attacks claimed 28 lives, making yesterday the bloodiest day since Sunday’s elections.
Gunmen shot dead 12 Iraqi soldiers after ordering them off a minibus near the northern city of Kirkuk.
Two Iraqi contract workers were killed near a military base in Baquba, north of Baghdad, and two civilians were killed by a mortar attack on a US base in Tal Afar, near Mosul.
A suicide car bomber attacked a convoy of foreigners on the road to Baghdad airport and there appeared to be a number of casualties.
Several Iraqi policemen and national guardsmen were killed in Baghdad and two US marines were killed in western Iraq on Wednesday.
Election officials said they were releasing the partial results to show that the slow and heavily guarded count was indeed under way, four days after the elections.
But the figures are from only 10% of the polling stations, in six southern provinces, and include no large Sunni Arab or Kurdish areas.
In each province between a quarter and two-thirds of the votes have been counted. “You cannot predict which list has won,” said Izzedin al-Mohammadi, an election commissioner. “We are trying to make these elections as transparent and fair as we can.”
He refused to give a turnout figure, although his colleagues have said that they believe that about 8m of the estimated 14m registered voters cast their ballot. It will still be several days before the final result is given.
Yesterday the negotiations between political leaders broke into the open when the leading Kurdish politician staked a claim to either the presidency or the premiership.
Jalal Talabani, who heads the united Kurdish political coalition, said his party had performed so well that he now expected one of the two leading offices.
“We as Kurds want one of those two posts and we will not give it up,” he told a news conference in Irbil, a Kurdish city in the north.
He is unlikely to become prime minister, the most powerful job, which will almost certainly go to a Shia.
The Shia coalition, led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, looks certain to be by far the strongest party.
Yesterday’s partial results give it 40 of the assembly’s 275 seats. Mr Allawi has about 10 so far.
The coalition may put forward Adil Abdul-Mehdi, the current finance minister; Hussein Shahristani, a scientist and technocrat; or even Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon’s former favourite.
Mr Allawi, who is a secular Shia, has a strong chance of retaining the job as a compromise candidate.
That makes Mr Talabani more likely to seek the post of president, a largely symbolic position but one that retains some powers over the new government.
*But many Shia politicians have already said that they will press for a Sunni Arab as president, in an effort to appeal to the minority Sunni Arab community, which is likely to be under-represented when the final votes are counted, because of the violence in their areas and their disillusionment with the elections. *
Election officials admitted for the first time yesterday that fear of violence had affected the voting and prevented people voting in some areas.
An inquiry team is to be sent to Mosul where there have been several days of protest, largely from the Christian community, which complained that tens of thousands of people had been unable to vote because there were not enough ballot papers.