Word: jalal
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...Kurdish List, which won 75 seats, is the most attractive coalition partner by measure of political arithmetic, although the Kurds intend to drive a hard bargain: They want their leader, Jalal Talabani, to be president; they want guarantees of a secular state; they want a federal constitution that accepts their de facto independence in the Kurdish provinces in the north; and they want those provinces expanded to include the oil-rich - and fiercely contested - city of Kirkuk. It remains to be seen how, and how much of the Kurdish agenda the Shiites can accommodate. But the incentive...
...Iran. Jaafari's Dawa party, like the SCIRI, spent its exile years based largely in Iran, and while their leaders are careful to distinguish themselves from the Iranian approach to involving the clergy in politics, they nonetheless express a strong kinship with the Iranians. Even the Kurdish presidential nominee, Jalal Talabani, has historically enjoyed good relations with Tehran. While the new government in Iraq is unlikely to mimic Iran's theocracy, it is likely to assume a foreign policy posture of friendship and cooperation with its Persian neighbor - and is unlikely to allow its territory to be used...
...concern to secure strong communal Shiite representation is mirrored among the Kurds, where the two major political parties, the longtime rival Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, have joined forces on the Kurdish Alliance list to ensure maximum representation of the Kurdish vote in the new assembly, of which they are expected to win the lion's share. The largest Sunni Party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, which had previously served in the interim government, has withdrawn from the election on the grounds that security conditions make voting impossible in most Sunni strongholds...
Some Iraqi politicians speculate that the Shi'ites may even offer the presidency to a prominent Sunni--possibly the incumbent, Ghazi al-Yawer. (Others have suggested that it's the Kurds' turn to get the presidency, making Jalal Talabani the front runner.) Sunni political parties like the Iraqi Islamic Party have indicated that they may be open to some such accommodation if the terms are right...
...When Jalal Sharaf casts his vote for a new Palestinian President this Sunday, he won't pay much attention to the candidates' positions on Israel or the future of the peace process. Sharaf, 41, has worked only six months since the beginning of the intifadeh in September 2000. He lives with his wife and eight children in a shack on Block 4 of the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza. They subsist on $7 a day scrounged from relatives. Desperate though it sounds, the family's predicament is hardly rare in Gaza's slums--and it is why Sharaf plans...