Iraq Election Results Point to a Big Win for Maliki

By Patrick Cockburn, Independent UK. Posted February 5, 2009.

The provincial elections have led to significant changes in the balance of power in other parts of Iraq. In Nineveh province, whose 2.7 million people are mostly Sunni Arabs, the Kurds make up between a quarter and a third of the population but have been in effective control since a Sunni uprising in 2004. They also had a majority on the local council because the Sunni boycotted the poll in the January 2005 election. But the winner on Saturday was al-Hadba, a nationalist and tribal coalition, whose leader claims to have won 60 percent of the vote. This Sunni success will make it more difficult for Kurdish parts of the province to join the near-independent Kurdish autonomous region.

In Anbar province, the cities and towns along the Euphrates river appear to have voted for the Awakening Movement, made up of former insurgents against the U.S. occupation who switched sides in order to fight al-Qa'ida, though this is contested. In general, Iraqi voters want to get rid of those who they see as having misruled them at a local level since the last election.

The survivor who outran Saddam

Nouri Kamal al-Maliki is nothing if not lucky. He belongs to a political party, Dawa, many of whose members were executed by Saddam Hussein. He was one of the few survivors. When he became Prime Minister in April 2006, the U.S. embassy was not even sure of his real name. Written off by many as ineffectual, he held on to office largely because no suitable replacement could be found. But in 2008 he saw off most of his domestic rivals and the U.S. in a series of confrontations, and now seems set to turn his personal popularity into victory at the polls.

Mr. Maliki was born in 1950 in the town of Abu Gharaq, south of Baghdad, the son of a teacher. He joined Dawa, the underground Shia political party, but it was savagely persecuted by Saddam and he was forced to flee to Syria in 1979. He remained there until 2003, becoming head of the party's Damascus branch, but had good relations with Iran.

On his return to Iraq after the U.S. occupation, the first Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, was removed after a year at the insistence of the U.S. and the Kurds. Mr Maliki replaced him as a compromise candidate.

At first his government seemed to drift, but over the last year the Iraqi state was largely restored to its old strength and Mr. Maliki was successively able to confront the Mehdi Army militia, the Kurds and the U.S.

See more stories tagged with: shia, sunnis, baghdad, basra, nouri al-maliki, dawa party, iyad allawi, furat al-sheraa

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