Word: shi'a
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Baqubah, the capital of Iraq's Diyala province, is a largely colorless place except for the winter orange harvest and the hundreds of campaign posters that line its streets. But at least the sectarian battles between Sunnis and Shi'ites that once raged through the city are now confined mostly to the ballot box as Baqubah, along with the rest of Iraq, prepares for national parliamentary elections on March 7. Inside the fortified government headquarters, Diyala's governor, Abdul-Nasser al-Mahdawi, is relatively optimistic that the elections - the fifth poll since the U.S. brought democracy to Iraq - will...
That's accurate. The parties are running their campaigns in large part on substantive issues: most important, whether power in Iraq should be more centralized in the hands of the government in Baghdad or dispersed to its provinces and regions. The centralizers include al-Maliki's Shi'ite-dominated State of Law coalition, which is running on its record of providing security and disarming Iraq's militias. The more Sunni and secular Iraqi National Movement, led by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, is likewise in favor of a strong central government. The push for decentralization is represented by the ruling...
...that pattern holds, Maliki's State of Law coalition would likely emerge with a plurality of the vote; there are, after all, probably twice as many Shi'ites as there are Sunnis in Iraq's electorate, even though hundreds of thousands more Sunnis appear to have voted this time compared with 2005's turnout. But Maliki is unlikely to win a majority, and would need coalition partners - perhaps from among the Kurdish nationalist parties that again polled strongly enough in their own areas to potentially earn a kingmaking role in Baghdad, or from the Sadrists and other Shi'ite Islamist...
...Iraq's Sunnis. Allawi's list of candidates includes some of the key Sunni political players, and the self-styled strongman makes no secret of his desire to challenge Iranian influence in Baghdad. Iran would prefer that Maliki stay in power, though Tehran is even closer to his Shi'ite rivals such as Sadr and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. (Watch a video about Iraq's vote...
...Iranian influence in the Middle East, and supported his eight-year war against the Islamic Republic in the 1980s. The U.S. invasion removed that bulwark, and Iran has profited greatly from Iraqi democracy. The governments elected since Saddam's overthrow have been uniformly friendly toward Tehran and dominated by Shi'ite parties. While none of these governments have been a proxy for Iran, they have certainly been resistant to being drawn into anti-Iran regional power games...