Word: sunni
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...announced on Tuesday its intention to demand that the Supreme Court disqualify as ineligible three candidates on Allawi's list because of alleged ties to the former regime of Saddam Hussein. If the court upholds this challenge - and it has sympathetically received the commission's previous effort to expel Sunni candidates - al-Maliki's 89 seats could then, theoretically, be deemed to have finished first. (Watch a TIME video about Iraq's elections...
...around. It helped, too, that his successors as Prime Minister - Ibrahim al-Jaafari and al-Maliki - were unable to deliver clean and efficient government. Allawi's party made a strong showing in last year's provincial elections, and that allowed him to unite a strong coalition of secular and Sunni parties under the Iraqi banner...
...coalitions preaching national unity, even if each retained a core identity well known to voters: Maliki's State of Law coalition ran on a law-and-order platform but drew primarily from a moderate Shi'ite base; Allawi's Iraqiya ran on a similar platform but ran strongest among Sunnis. But even if Iraq's politicians pretended to have outgrown identity politics, voters either didn't get the memo or saw through the spin, and voted largely by ethnicity and sect. Allawi won in majority Sunni areas; Maliki won his seats in majority in Shi'ite areas; and Kurds voted...
...power, but struggled nonetheless to present himself as a truly national figure. While he had cracked down hard against terrorism and militias, especially the radical Shi'ite followers of Moqtada al Sadr, his support for a government de-Ba'athification committee that banned 500 parliamentary candidates - including many key Sunni politicians - a few weeks before the election appears to have helped fuel Sunni suspicion that he harbored a sectarian agenda. Maliki's troubles have been a boon to the Sadrists, who entered the election as the junior partner in the INA. But the Sadrists appear to be among...
...Iran won't be the only country likely to flex its muscles after the election. Turkey - which has a restive Kurdish minority of its own - will try to block any further devolution of power to Kurdistan. And last month, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah invited leaders of a pro-Sunni coalition to visit Riyadh, a sign that the kingdom would like to play a role as protector of Iraq's Sunnis. "Everyone in the region will try to occupy Iraq," says Sheik Hussam al-Mojammai, the head of Baqubah's Awakening Council, a Sunni citizens' brigade that helped defeat insurgent...