Preliminary results looking good for Iraqiyya

Anbar province, Iraq's Sunni stronghold, is basically a rout for Iraqiyya. The Iraqi Unity coalition -- which should have been Iraqiyya's strongest competition in the province -- is headed for a washout, as Marc Lynch writes, and may not win a single parliamentary seat.

The fiery Shaykh Ali Hatem Sulayman joined Prime Minister Maliki's State of Law coalition, but the entire list has yet to reach 5000 votes. Recruiting the outspoken Hamed al-Hayyes to the primarily Shia Iraqi National Alliance has thus far attracted less than 4000 votes. Unity of Iraq may just squeak out a single seat, but even that looks like it may be close.

Iraqiyya will also take a clear majority of seats in Diyala, Salaheddin, and Ninewa provinces. And it's running neck-and-neck with the Kurdistan Alliance in Kirkuk; the province's 12 seats will basically be a split between those two coalitions.

What about the provinces south of Baghdad? Nobody expected Iraqiyya to fare well in, say, Maysan or Karbala or Najaf -- Shi'ite strongholds. But those provinces boosted Iraqiyya in a different way: The Shi'ite vote basically split, which dilutes the power of both Maliki's State of Law coalition and the Iraqi National Alliance. In Najaf, those two coalitions are within 10 percent of each other; in Maysan, Muthanna, Qadisiyah and Wassit, they're within 25 percent.

These two trends -- strong Iraqiyya results in the north, and a split Shi'ite vote in the south -- bode well for Allawi's coalion.