Ten months after making ink-stained fingers a joyous symbol of newfound freedom and determination, Iraqis will go to the polls again Thursday in an election with far higher stakes for the country, the region and the United States.
"What happens in Iraq will shape the future of the world," U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters Tuesday in the fortified Green Zone.
In a Baghdad hospital, Mohammed Sadoun voiced more immediate desires.
In the bed where he has lain since the weekend, when his legs were shattered by gunfire as a U.S. military Humvee passed him on his morning commute, Sadoun said, "I'm voting in hopes that this cloud over our country will be lifted."
He shifted his hand to the bedrail and weakly raised an ink-stained index finger.
At another hospital across town, victims of more recent violence missed Iraq's early round of voting for patients. One lay dead on a gurney, under a sheet splattered red like a painter's tarp. Another lay in the hospital parking lot, surrounded by crouching, black-clad women waiting for one of the rent-a-coffins that Baghdad's poor use to shuttle their dead to the grave.
"Nothing will change" with the elections, Kindi Hospital's chief doctor, Nasaar Maad, said after receiving the three bombing dead of the morning. "The explosions will continue."
Thursday's vote will give Iraq its first full-term, four-year legislature since the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. The lawmakers, in turn, will choose a government that will rule on proposals to split Iraq into three or more highly autonomous sectarian or ethnically based regions. The government's performance will determine whether the 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq can begin to leave, and whether political violence -- which has killed thousands since the hopeful celebrations of January -- eases or escalates into civil or regional war.
Candidates marked the last legal day of campaigning for the 275-seat legislature Tuesday. Tethered to the minarets of mosques and floating high over rubble-strewn Baghdad were giant green and yellow helium balloons emblazoned with the ballot ID number of the governing Shiite religious coalition.
Billboards looked down on the gray city as well, most touting well-funded former exiles such as Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz Hakim, who leads the current transitional government's strongest party; Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, the master deal-maker and former U.S. favorite; and onetime prime minister Ayad Allawi.
Violence grinds on
As the campaigning came to a close, the violence ground on. On Tuesday, a jury-rigged bomb killed four U.S. Army soldiers on patrol in Baghdad. Another bomb barely missed a leading Shiite religious politician. And unknown gunmen killed a Sunni candidate who had been highly critical of the Iranian-influenced Shiite parties while he was campaigning in Anbar province, a stronghold of the overwhelmingly Sunni insurgency.
The election pits the religious parties of Iraq's newly ascendant Shiite majority against those who want to curb their power. Sunni Arabs and secular Iraqis, in particular, say the outcome will determine whether Iraq becomes a Shiite theocracy like its neighbor Iran, which is watching intently.
More than 1,000 Sunni clerics issued a religious decree, or fatwa , urging their followers to vote, rallying what is expected to be a massive turnout by Sunnis, who widely obeyed the clerics' instructions to boycott parliamentary elections in January.
In Baghdad, the leader of the most feared of Iraq's factional militias seemed to warn of war if the Sunnis won. "We will raise our weapons as we did before if the Baathists come to power again," said Haidi Amery, leader of the officially disbanded Badr militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the Shiite religious parties brought to power in January's vote. Some in the Shiite ruling coalition invoke the name of Hussein's Sunni-dominated Baath Party when referring to any Sunni or secular Iraqi, particularly Allawi.
The Supreme Council's leader, Hakim, complained Tuesday that election authorities had allowed candidates whom the Supreme Council believes to be former top Baathists. "No Iraqi accepts this violation," the bearded, turbaned Hakim told a gathering of Shiite tribal sheiks in his heavily guarded compound on the Tigris River. "No, we don't accept it," the crowd shouted back.
Hakim told the sheiks he had offered 200,000 armed members of the former Badr militia to ensure security during the election. The tribal leaders chanted in approval. Hakim called for the government to allow what he called "vigilante groups" to coordinate with Iraqi security ministries "to form a force to defeat terrorism and secure the cities."
Hakim's Supreme Council is the leading group in a slightly altered version of the Shiite religious alliance that won the most votes in January's election and remains the coalition to beat Thursday. Though certain to win the greatest number of votes again, the alliance is not expected to do as well as in January, owing in part to broad disappointment over the current government.
Adel Abdul Mahdi, a deputy vice president and member of the Supreme Council, is seen as the party's top contender for the prime minister's post going into the vote. But many who do not want to see the Shiite religious parties in power again consider Allawi the man to beat them.
Allawi led Iraq's U.S.-sponsored interim administration from June 2004 until January's vote. His approval of a U.S. military push into the holy city of Najaf against Moqtada Sadr's Shiite militia helped him build a reputation for the kind of toughness that many security-starved Iraqis now crave. His electoral bloc has backing among secular and Sunni Iraqis and is expected to win more than the 40 seats it garnered in January.
Allawi finished the campaign Tuesday by speaking to reporters from the steps of a garden at his party headquarters, guarded by U.S. and Iraqi military vehicles because it is one of Baghdad's most regular targets for bombings. Eleven people involved with Allawi's bloc have been killed in the past two weeks -- roughly one a day, he noted. In Najaf, mobs and armed attackers chased his convoy out of town this month.
Allawi's status as the most prominent challenger to the Shiite religious bloc has drawn political attacks as well as gunfire. Chalabi, another returned exile, whose organization supplied much of the intelligence that led the United States to invade Iraq, has accused Allawi's interim government of stealing or wasting millions of dollars meant for rebuilding Iraq.
Chalabi's own campaign has rested heavily on promises of cash. In an appearance on al-Arabiya television Tuesday, he outlined a program for an "oil holding company" to which each Iraqi would belong by birth. "We in the next parliament can make a law that says every citizen will be able to receive a share of the oil revenues by cash," Chalabi said.
Chalabi also promised to give about 2,100 square feet of land to each homeless family and proposed a $2 billion loan program to build houses on those plots.
Chalabi is running as the head of his own small bloc after declining to join the Shiite alliance when it refused to guarantee him the prime minister's post, his and Hakim's aides have said. Iraqi and American leaders speak respectfully of his adroitness and ability to survive political struggles, but Chalabi is fighting long-running corruption allegations and many Iraqis distrust him.
Sunni Arabs are splintered
Sunni Arabs are more splintered. How moderates and militants among them fare Thursday will be a strong indicator of what share of the community expects the future to be violent.
On Tuesday, two men holding high-powered weapons jumped from a car in Ramadi, capital of turbulent Anbar province, and opened fire on a Sunni candidate, Muzhir Dulaimi, as he attempted to campaign openly, according to Muzen Farhan, a tribal sheik who witnessed the shooting, and others.
In Baghdad, where he and other government leaders will cast ballots Thursday in the American-dominated Green Zone, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari ruminated over the performance of his government during a luncheon in which he recited poetry and quoted Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History."
Jafari, who is a candidate on the Shiite religious slate but whose popularity has been blighted by a personality perceived as inward-looking and a government seen as drifting, said his greatest accomplishment in power was staving off war.
"Everybody in the insurgency wanted to bring a civil war into Iraq," Jafari said over expertly prepared Iraqi cuisine. "But that didn't happen in the past. And it's not going to happen in the future."
Correspondent Jonathan Finer and special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.
