Shia alliance set to win

Soldiers of the Iraqi Army show an American marine a picture of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who appears to have gained much more of the vote than was expected. Picture / Reuters

The coalition of Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi interim Prime Minister appointed by the Americans, is heading for election defeat at the hands of a list backed by the country's senior Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, partial results released yesterday indicate.

The results from Baghdad - where Allawi was expected to do well - show the one-time CIA protege with only 140,364 votes compared with 350,069 for the alliance, which is headed by a Shia cleric who lived in Iran for many years.

Among the mostly five Shia provinces tallied so far, the alliance has 1.1 million of the 1.6 million votes counted. Allawi's list was second with 360,500.

"Large numbers of Shia voted along sectarian lines," said Sharif Ali bin Hussein, head of the Constitutional Monarchy Party. "Americans are in for a shock. A lot of people in the country are going to wake up in shock."

Safwat Rashid, a member of Iraq's Independent Election Commission, and international poll officials warned observers not to read too much into the numbers, which did not include Sunni or Kurdish provinces.

The list of Ayatollah Sistani, who did not run for election, had been expected to do extremely well. It remains to be seen, however, whether it will obtain more than 50 per cent of the seats in the 275-member Parliament.

Rashid said the vote total would not be known for another 10 days, although numbers from Iraqis abroad had been ratified.

About 170,000 ballots were cast, with 44 per cent voting for the Sistani list, 18 per cent for the Kurdish list, 12 per cent for Allawi's list and 8 per cent for the main Christian Iraqi list.

Rashid said the Baghdad numbers came from "mixed" neighbourhoods.

Many analysts have concluded that Allawi performed so poorly there and other parts of the Shia south, where he hoped to make a stronger second-place showing, that he has little chance of working his way back as Prime Minister.

Given the extent to which the US and Britain built up Allawi, his removal would be seen as a serious blow.

Leaders of the alliance list - which ran a vociferous grassroots campaign aided by mosques and with the blessing of the revered Ayatollah Sistani - were celebrating 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, who is deputy chief of staff for Ibrahim al-Jaffari, the number two candidate on the alliance list and leader of the Dawa Party.

Kadhimi said the alliance would insist that one of its members become Prime Minister, arguing that Allawi had been invited to join it months ago but declined in order to create his own coalition. "[Mr Allawi] had his chance," he said.

The alliance would try to quell the country's violent Sunni-led insurgency by improving services, he said. "If we can win the heart of the people, the people will be in support of the Government.

"Maybe they can provide information and help to surround and isolate the insurgents."

* Iraqi insurgents staged a major ambush on a road near Baghdad yesterday, killing two policemen, wounding 14 and leaving at least 16 missing on the worst day of violence since last Sunday's election.

The attack came a day after guerrillas in the north dragged Iraqi soldiers off a bus and shot 12 of them dead, and suggests the country's 22-month-long insurgency is far from over, despite its failure to stop last weekend's vote.

Police said insurgents attacked a police convoy between Diwaniya, 180km south of Baghdad, and the capital. Police initially feared 36 were missing but reduced the number as some began returning to Diwaniya.

US forces sealed off the site of the ambush, near the Abu Ghraib area on Baghdad's western fringes. Police said some of the wounded were treated in hospital in Diwaniya.

At least a dozen civilians were also killed on the same day.

In the earlier bus attack near the northern oil city of Kirkuk, militants pulled 14 police officers off their bus and killed 12 of them with bullets to their heads.

The other two escaped to a nearby village.

Two US Marines were also killed in Anbar province west of Baghdad, a hotbed of anti-American militancy.

- INDEPENDENT and REUTERS