Baghdad — Partial Iraqi election results released yesterday suggest that interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s coalition is being roundly defeated by a roster backed by a senior cleric with links to Tehran.

The totals, which emerged amid an upswing of violence that killed at least
26 Iraqis and two U.S. marines after a brief period of post-election calm, reflected only an incomplete count from five mainly Shia provinces and the capital. But they appeared to diminish the chances of a place in the next government for Mr. Allawi, a one-time Central Intelligence Agency protégé with Washington’s support.

Mr. Allawi had been expected to come out strong in Baghdad, but the count showed him with just 140,364 votes there, compared with 350,069 for the United Iraqi Alliance, which is sponsored by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
The Shia leader lived in Iran for many years.

Among the five mostly Shia provinces tallied so far, the alliance’s lead is even wider, ahead of Mr. Allawi by 5 to 1 to one in some places. In total, the alliance had tallied 1.1 million of the 1.6 million votes cast at 10 per cent of polling centres in the capital and the Shia south. Mr. Allawi’s list was second, with more than 360,500 votes.

Sharif Ali bin Hussein, head of the Sunni-oriented Constitutional Monarchy Party, likened the vote to a ‘Sistani Tsunami’ that will shake both Baghdad and Washington.

‘Americans are in for a shock,’ he said. ‘A lot of people in the country are going to wake up in shock.’

Safwat Rashid, a member of Iraq’s Independent Election Commission, warned observers not to read too much into the tallies, which did not include numbers from Sunni- or Kurdish-dominated provinces. He said the vote total and full turnout numbers won’t be known for another 10 days.

‘Only God Almighty knows the final turnout figures now,’ he said, acknowledging that the Baghdad numbers came from ‘mixed’ Sunni-Shia neighbourhoods where Mr. Allawi had been expected to perform well.

Many analysts concluded that Mr. Allawi’s performance leaves him with little chance of returning to the prime minister’s seat. Ethnic Kurds and secular Iraqis had hoped that he would be able to outmanoeuvre the United Iraqi Alliance, which many fear is a front for Tehran and could wind up pushing for an Islamic theocracy.

Western officials in Baghdad also appeared to be preparing for Mr. Allawi’s defeat.

The alliance ‘is a very diverse group of people, from Westernized independents to Sunni sheiks to people who really believe in an Islamic state. It will be hard to maintain unity,’ one hopeful diplomat said.

Mr. Allawi called for a meeting of political representatives of the other groups on Wednesday to try and work his way back into the alliance’s good graces, according to a political insider.

But alliance leaders were gloating about their prospects, predicting they would win the 138-seat majority necessary to ratify a cabinet.

‘I think we are almost there and even more,’ said Adnan Ali al-Kadhimi, the deputy chief of staff for No. 2 party candidate Ibrahim al-Jaffari.

Mr. al-Kadhimi said Sunnis would receive powerful posts in an alliance government, even though Sunni voters largely stayed away from the polls fearing the kind of violence that resumed yesterday — a string of attacks that killed about 30 people.

South of Kirkuk, insurgents stopped a minibus, ordered army recruits off the vehicle and killed 12 of them. In Baghdad, a suicide bomber struck a foreign convoy escorted by U.S. military Humvees near the capital’s airport, and insurgents killed five Iraqi policemen and an Iraqi National Guard major in a separate ambush.

Two U.S. marines were killed in clashes in the province of Anbar, and gunmen killed two Iraqi contractors in Baqouba, firing on the vehicle that was carrying them to jobs at a U.S. military base.

---