Word: allawi
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...that, rather than make the Sunni triangle secure for democracy, the assault on Fallujah may instead inflame Sunnis and scatter insurgents across a wider area, which could scuttle hopes of broad Sunni participation in the voting. The Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni political party in Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's interim government withdrew last week, saying it could not abide the attack on Fallujah. Meanwhile, the influential Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni group, has called for a total boycott of the elections. The association's leader, Harith al-Dhari, told TIME he was "very close to calling...
...Fallujah, that fact alone may not be enough to encourage Sunni voters to turn out. Indeed, the operation in Fallujah strengthened calls to boycott the election by the Association of Muslim Scholars, an organization influential among Sunni clerics, and prompted the main Sunni political party to withdraw from the Allawi government...
...even greater concern for the Allawi government, however, may be the impact of the battle for Fallujah on its credibility. As the battle began, Allawi announced that he'd ordered the offensive because those with whom his government had been negotiating in Fallujah had stubbornly refused to hand over Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian fugitive who has claimed responsibility for numerous terror strikes and hostage beheadings throughout Iraq. The delegates from Fallujah had insisted they could not hand over Zarqawi because he was not, in fact, present in the city. Whether or not this claim was true at the time...
Iraq, by most accounts, continues to disintegrate. In the week before the U.S. election, an Iraqi national security aide to interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi allowed that 5% of the recently trained Iraqi troops were probably terrorist infiltrators. "I love David Petraeus," a retired four-star general told me, referring to the U.S. officer in charge of training the Iraqi force. "But you can't train a soldier in six weeks. And you can't motivate a soldier who doesn't have a real government to fight for. It might change for the better if we can hold credible elections...
...even greater concern to Allawi and his backers than insurgent actions elsewhere, however, may be the political fallout from Fallujah. The battle's long-term impact will be measured in light of the contest between the Coalition and the insurgents for Sunni hearts and minds in Iraq. The insurgency has been sustained by a strong nationalist sentiment among Sunnis, who had been the dominant social group in Saddam Hussein's Iraq - indeed, ever since the country was first created by Britain. A widely held sense of uncertainty over their future as a minority in a democratic Iraq had been compounded...