State of Law - Tag Search

Another batch of results from Iraq, this time from Karbala province, where prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition has a roughly two-to-one lead over the Iraqi National Alliance. You can view the latest results here.

The Independent High Electoral Commission hasn't posted numbers from Kirkuk yet, but there are reports that Iyad Allawi's Iraqiyya coalition has a narrow lead over the Kurdistan Alliance. That would be a surprising outcome -- though preliminary results could oversample Sunni neighborhoods and therefore be misleading.

IHEC hasn't released any new results (عربي) today, so the latest official data is still the preliminary results from six provinces reported yesterday.

But the commission did release a statement that generally characterizes the vote in four southern provinces. We already knew prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition did well in Babil and Najaf provinces. The commission says State of Law is also leading in Dhi Qar, Wassit, Qadisiyah and Muthanna provinces. All four are majority-Shi'ite. None are particularly large; Dhi Qar is probably the only one with a population larger than one million.

We've heard a lot of talk about voter fraud in the days since the election -- but how much of it is legitimate, and how much is simply political parties trying to sow doubts about the election to discredit the winner?

Update, 12:58 p.m.: IHEC released data for Misan province, too, which we've added to the table.

Original post: IHEC released another batch of preliminary results -- for Erbil, Diyala and Salaheddin provinces -- which also updates yesterday's numbers from Babel and Najaf. A cautionary note: These are not final numbers; only between 18 and 35 percent of the vote in each province has been counted.

Iraqiyya was the big winner in Diyala and Salaheddin provinces. State of Law and the Iraqi National Alliance posted similar results in both provinces; interior minister Jawad al-Bolani's Iraqi Unity alliance did fairly well in Salaheddin, placing second.

In Erbil, the Kurdistan Alliance currently has a clear majority, with more than 90,000 votes. The Gorran movement placed second; two Islamic Kurdish parties followed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, isn't happy about yesterday's court decision allowing hundreds of banned candidates to run in the March 7 parliamentary election.

A spokesman for Maliki, Ali al-Dabbagh, said the appellate court's decision is illegal and unconstitutional, and that the law "must be applied as it is." Maliki said the decision is not binding -- a position also adopted by Ali Faysal al-Lami, the chairman of the Justice and Accountability Commission -- and called yesterday for an emergency session of parliament to review the candidates.

Iraqi president Jalal Talabani has ordered a high-level commission to investigate the Justice and Accountability Commission's decision to ban 511 candidates from the March election.

"I myself am not satisfied with the banning decision," said Talabani, a Kurd who heads the three-member presidential council. "We have sent a letter to the Supreme Appeal Court asking whether this committee that issued the decision is legitimate or not."

Talabani's announcement comes 24 hours after Iraqi vice president Tariq al-Hashimi declared the ban illegal. The two men met yesterday at Talabani's home to discuss the decision; neither has released details of the meeting, but it's clear they decided to fight the ban.

Okay, as promised, some more detail on this afternoon's "Iraq in 2020" panel at the Middle East Institute conference. The whole concept was something of a conceit -- as a reader pointed out, there's a lot of uncertainty about Iraq in 2010 -- so most of the panel focused on shorter-term concerns.

I complained earlier about the lack of focus on economics. The panel mostly focused on politics and diplomacy -- how Iraqis will reconcile internally, and how they'll relate to their neighbors (and the U.S.) externally. What really struck me was the divergence between the American panelists, who tended to be more optimistic about the future, and the Iraqi panelists, who seemed pessimistic about intractable problems of Iraqi governance.

A reader passes along the news, which I missed, that Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani is in Baghdad for a four-day visit.

Larijani is reportedly "mediating" between Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and Ammar Al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq. Hakim formed a coalition earlier this year, the Iraqi National Alliance, with Moqtada al-Sadr's movement; Maliki broke away from that Shi'ite alliance -- or was forced out, depending on who you ask -- and formed his own State of Law coalition.

By encouraging reconciliation between Maliki and Hakim, Larijani is trying to create a united Shi'ite front in the 2010 election.

Forgot to mention this yesterday, but Nouri al-Maliki formally unveiled his new State of Law political coalition. It contains 40 different parties -- not just Shi'ites, but also Sunni and Kurdish groups.

Maliki decided to form the coalition after refusing to join the new ISCI-Sadr alliance, which refused to promise him another term as prime minister.

Nouri al-Maliki announced today that he's breaking away from the Iraqi National Alliance and forming his own "State of Law" coalition in January's election.

No surprise here: Conventional wisdom for the last month has been that Maliki would strike out on his own after the ISCI-Sadrist alliance refused to anoint him as its chosen prime minister. The new coalition sets up an intra-Shi'a battle in January.