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...vote. In a minor but positive sign, officials even decided to leave polls open for an additional hour after some Iraqis complained of names missing from polling lists. Preliminary results, to be released on Feb. 5, are expected to garner some controversy, however. In one Shi'ite province, a candidate who is unofficially leading the polls has been accused of serving as a top official in Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime. In other regions, allegations of voter fraud have been made...
...Allawi told TIME at the Baghdad headquarters of his political party, the Iraqi National Accord. "I respect religion. But religion needs to be de-politicized." Despite the gains made by Allawi's secular list in last weekend's provincial elections, the big winner at the polls was the Shi'ite-led alliance of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki - who remains the man to beat in the national election slated for next year...
...Allawi, a Shi'ite and former Baathist who was tapped by the U.S. occupation authority to be Iraq's first Prime Minister after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, has always billed himself as stridently secular. But when Iraqis were given the right to choose their leaders at the polls, Allawi lost out to the parties based on Shi'ite and Sunni identity. Since then, he and his party have been working to promote a more secular approach to Iraqi governance, and the preliminary returns released on Thursday for Iraq's provincial elections show they are making gains - at least relative...
Nevertheless, some in Baghdad are calling for the group to be allowed to remain in Iraq, or at least to not be turned over to Iran, for political reasons. "We have to deal with this issue very delicately," says Ayad Jamal al-Deen, an Iraqi parliamentarian aligned with Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. "I'm not here to defend this organization. I have no interest in them. But I am looking out for the Iraqi national interest." Al-Deen and other Iraqi political figures see the group essentially as a bargaining chip with Iran, one of the few Iraq...
...rejectionists remain at large in Iraq. On Tuesday, attackers torched a polling station near the city of Fallujah in Anbar province. And sporadic bombings persist in Baghdad, Mosul and Diyala province. But the fear of carnage that has surrounded past elections and mass public gatherings like the regular Shi'ite pilgrimages is low.(See TIME's photo-essay "Showdown in Fallujah...