Word: sunni
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...combine to give tremendous advantage to the parties and coalitions that either carry some prior national or communal standing, or have access to effective national channels of communication, or both. Lists with access to government - particularly the Iraqi List of acting Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, which combines largely secular Sunni and Shiite candidates, and to a lesser extent, the separate Iraqis Party list of acting president Ghazi al-Yawer, which has a similar makeup to Allawi's although it includes Sunni elements critical of U.S. military actions - have the advantage of incumbency, particularly as regards media access. But that...
...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 The largest Sunni Party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, which had previously served in the interim government, has withdrawn from the election on the grounds that security conditions make voting impossible in most Sunni strongholds. Groupings such as the Assembly of Independent Democrats of Adnan Pachachi are hoping to secure some support from more...
...Insurgents The most significant opponents of the election are clearly the Sunni insurgency, composed of former Baathists, Sunni nationalists and Islamists (mostly local, although with small numbers of foreigners, most notably the Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, who recently became al-Qaeda's man in Iraq). That's because they're waging a campaign of terror to intimidate would-be candidates, electoral workers and voters from showing up at the polls. The insurgency is believed to number some 20,000 to 40,000 hard-core fighters, although Iraq's interim intelligence chief says it is able to call on a wider...
...Boycotters Unarmed groups such as the influential Sunni Muslim Scholars Association are calling for a boycott of the polls, questioning their legitimacy and insisting that elections can't be held as long as U.S. troops remain in the country. They may share some of the political goals and concerns of the insurgency, but they insist that a non-violent call for a boycott is a legitimate democratic protest tactic...
...uncertain. Some have argued that Iraq is not just approaching the tipping point of civil war but is already fully immersed in one. Details about candidates and polling locations have been highly guarded due to security concerns. It is expected that a large portion of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs will not participate in the elections at all, which almost surely means the National Assembly will have few Sunni representatives. This result may exacerbate ethnic tensions...