Iraq

Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission released preliminary results today from two provinces, Babel and Najaf, both predominantly Shi'ite.

Prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition has a modest lead over the Iraqi National Alliance, the Shi'ite coalition between the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Sadrist movement. Iyad Allawi's Iraqiyya coalition placed a distant third in both provinces. Maliki doesn't have a majority in either province: He won about 47 percent of the vote in Najaf, and 42 percent in Babel.

No surprises here, really, and this first batch of results basically correspondents with the rumors we've heard in the Iraqi press. The numbers are after the jump.

Thought the de-Ba'athification controversy would end with the election? Think again:

Ahmed Chalabi and Ali al Lami, the men responsible for the purge of hundreds of candidates with Baathist links from the Iraqi elections, said they are taking the country's Independent Higher Electoral Commission to court in a bid to have votes for 55 candidates voided.

These 55 candidates are replacements for 55 other candidates who were already barred by the Justice and Accountability Commission. Chalabi and Lami say the replacements are Ba'athists, too. The fun never stops! Their names and the provinces they hail from haven't been released yet (at least, I can't seem to find them).

We've pulled together the preliminary province-by-province voter turnout numbers from Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission (no turnout data for Karbala province yet, for some reason). They're in a table after the jump, along with data from the December 2005 parliamentary elections (pdf), also from IHEC.

Every province reported a lower turnout in 2010 than in 2005. Misan province had the lowest turnout, with 50 percent; Dahuk had the highest, at 80 percent. Turnout was generally highest in northern Iraq, and gets lower as you head further south.

IHEC says preliminary results will be released tomorrow morning (Baghdad time), so we hope to have some details later tonight (there's a lot of perhaps-not-very-well-informed speculation in the Iraqi press, if you need something to hold you over). Relatedly: Michael Hanna has some good points, as usual, on the turnout numbers.

There's a lot of speculation (عربي) in Iraqi newspapers this morning about election results (عربي). I'm not going to bother summarizing it: The Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) says it won't release even preliminary results until March 10 or 11, so any reported results at this point are probably uninformed guesswork. IHEC actually held a press conference last night (عربي) warning everyone not to trust these early reports.

President Obama issued a few brief remarks yesterday afternoon, after polls closed in Iraq. Most of it was fairly standard stuff -- glad to see the brave Iraqi people exercising their right to vote, terrorists tried and failed to disrupt the election, etc. -- but he also made a slightly interesting comment about the withdrawal timetable.

I'm sure it will annoy Henry Kissinger and the Washington Post's editorial board, but I (for one) was glad to see this Washington Post story on the White House "keeping its distance" from the Iraqi elections. It reflects a sensible policy decision by the Obama administration: The U.S. has diminishing influence in Iraq, and its efforts to influence the elections have been decried as meddling, so a hands-off approach is best.

Polls closed in Iraq a few minutes ago after 10 hours of voting. The ballot was marred by a few dozen insurgent attacks around the country -- but casualties are remarkably low, and voter turnout (anecdotally at least) seems to be fairly high.

We'll update this thread throughout the day with new developments. Today's news will largely come from non-Iraqi sources: Many Iraqi newspapers suspended publication for the day to allow their staffs time to vote. Here's Al-Rafidayn's statement on the suspension (عربي), for example; As-Sabaah has a banner across its homepage (عربي). So most of today's news comes from Western and pan-Arab news sources.

I forgot to make this point in yesterday's Maliki/SOFA post -- thanks to Joel Wing (in comments) and Michael Hanna (via e-mail) for reminding me.

I do think the Iraqi and American governments will renegotiate the status of forces in a very limited sense, either later this year or next, to provide for a small contingent of U.S. trainers in Iraq. This is standard practice in countries that receive U.S. military aid: If the Pentagon gives high-tech military hardware to another army, someone has to teach that army how to use its new equipment. And Iraq will continue to receive billions in military aid for years to come.

But we're talking about, at most, a few thousand troops -- not the Korea on the Tigris envisioned by Tom Ricks. When I said yesterday that Maliki is unlikely to renegotiate the SOFA, I was referring to that latter scenario.

As many as 150,000 Iraqi security personnel were unable to vote early, while other reports of fraud and intimidation blackened the first days of Iraq's second post-invasion parliamentary election, according to Loveday Morris of the National.

Early voting in Iraq for security forces, hospital staff, prisoners and the disabled began on Thursday, but thousands of staff members from government agencies such as the ministries of interior and defense arrived at polling stations to find that their names had been left off the voting lists, Morris wrote.

I nearly fainted earlier today when I glanced up at CNN and saw a reporter doing a live shot from... Iraq! I thought U.S. networks forgot the country existed -- but for a week, at least, it's back on television.

The reporter in question was CNN's Arwa Damon, and she was rolling clips of an interview with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who hinted at asking U.S. troops to stay beyond 2011 -- a decision that would require amending the Status of Forces Agreement.

The BBC has a somewhat alarming story about exponentially higher rates of birth defects in Fallujah in the years following the U.S. invasion.

That's what the story claims, at least. But there's not much analytical rigor in the piece, which doesn't define what it means by "birth defect" and presents mostly anecdotal data. The topic deserves further study before we conclude there's a crisis.

The campaigning might be over in Iraq, but Ali Faysal al-Lami's Justice and Accountability Commission never rests. Nor does Reidar Visser, who flags this bit of last-minute de-Ba'athification news:

... sources in the accountability and justice board say they have written to the Iraqi elections commission (IHEC) to have the name of candidate number 10 for the State of Law list in Najaf, Abbud Wahid al-Eisawi, struck from the ballot paper. Eisawi is a tribal adviser to Nuri al-Maliki.

Visser makes two points, both worth repeating: First, the last-minute timing of this decision -- we're forty-eight hours before election day, folks -- shows how inherently political the de-Ba'athifiation process has been; second, the fact that Maliki's adviser got de-Ba'athified shows that the Iraqi National Alliance is running the show.

Never a dull moment! In more encouraging news, the Iraqi government says there's really no warrant for Moqtada al-Sadr's arrest, and that his inclusion on the warrant was a typo (عربي).

After a final campaign push today, Iraq's parliamentary campaign season is drawing to a halt, and the Iraqi electoral commission is getting ready for the ballot on March 7.

Voting started today for the disabled, and for soldiers and medical personnel, most of whom will be on duty during the general voting on Sunday. Iraqi newspapers say sandstorms throughout the country didn't disrupt the balloting (عربي).

Government offices and schools have shut down so election officials can prepare polling places. And checkpoints are going up across the country; more than 200,000 police and soldiers will be on duty in Baghdad alone.

Nir Rosen reports from Iraq in The National's weekly Review, and it's worth a read, as is most of Rosen's work. In many ways, today's piece is similar to his April 2009 Review piece: Rosen argues that the Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian war is over, because the Iraqi state is too strong.

There are still militias active in Iraq, and the level of deadly violence would be unacceptable almost anywhere else on Earth. But the fears frequently voiced by foreign analysts and reporters - that the civil war is merely in abeyance, and that sectarian fury could break out again at any moment after a series of deadly attacks, or an unfavourable election result - are overblown.

But you nonetheless see some ominous signs for the future throughout Rosen's piece.

The other big Iraq story this morning, aside from the Moqtada al-Sadr warrant, is a spate of suicide bombings in Diyala province which killed about 30 people.

Two car bombs went off simultaneously this morning, around 9:30 local time, at the provincial government's main building in Baquba (the capital of Diyala) and in a nearby intersection. A third bomber, reportedly wearing a police uniform with the rank of lieutenant, blew himself up at Baquba's main hospital -- as casualties from the first two bombings began arriving for treatment.

Iraq's Supreme Court has reportedly reissued a six-year-old warrant for Moqtada al-Sadr's arrest.

This story isn't getting much attention in the English-language media -- everyone's focused on the Diyala bombings (more on those soon) -- but it has the potential to be quite significant.

The warrant is for the 2003 murder of Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a pro-American Shi'ite cleric who was hacked to death by a mob in Najaf. The Coalition Provisional Authority issued a warrant for Sadr's arrest in 2004, but he was never arrested, and the warrant was eventually buried as part of a reconciliation deal with his Mahdi Army.

78,000 Iraqi and international monitors are fanning out across Iraq (عربي) ahead of parliamentary elections on Sunday. It's an admirable effort by 30 international organizations and more than 300 Iraqi groups -- though I would argue that the worst shenanigans (i.e. the de-Ba'athification circus) have already happened. Low-level fraud on election day won't matter nearly as much as the political wrangling that preceded the vote.

It's the middle of the night in Baghdad, so we'll have to wait a few hours for Iraqi reaction, but Nouri al-Maliki unexpectedly decided to reinstate 20,000 former Iraqi officers who got the boot when the U.S. disbanded Iraq's army in 2003.

Maliki did this ten days before the election, so I think it's safe to say he's pandering for votes, particularly Sunni ones. A spokesman for the Iraqiyya coalition seems to share that analysis.

I promised to stop writing about calls for delayed withdrawal in Iraq, so I'll keep this short. But Tom Ricks has a new CNAS policy paper repeating his call for a delayed withdrawal. It's basically a longer version of yesterday's op-ed, with a couple of photos and a graph about coalition troop strength (which contributes nothing to the reader's understanding of current events in Iraq).

That didn't last long: Salah al-Mutlak's National Dialogue Front, which dropped out of the Iraqi elections less than a week ago, announced today that it will run after all.

Mutlak held a press conference in Baghdad with Iyad Allawi, the head of the Iraqiyya coalition. He didn't elaborate much on why he changed his mind -- saying only that "we decided to participate for the sake of change." And he rejected calls for a Sunni boycott, urging all Iraqis to vote in the March 7 election.