In a Reversal, Sunnis Vote, to Retain a Voice in Iraq

Image by Kurdistan KURD كوردستان كردستان ا via Flickr

By ANTHONY SHADID

FALLUJA, Iraq — In this town, nicknamed the City of Mosques, the scratchy loudspeakers of muezzins that once preached resistance to the American occupation implored Sunni Arabs to defy bombs and vote Sunday. They did, in a landmark election that demonstrated how far Iraq has come and perhaps how far it has to go.

The droves of Sunni Arab residents casting ballots in towns like Falluja — the name itself synonymous with the cradle of the insurgency, where relatively few voted in the last election five years ago — promised to redraw Iraq’s political landscape. The turnout delivered Sunnis their most articulated voice yet on the national stage, seven years after the American-led invasion ended their dominance.

Yet the act of their empowerment Sunday may make that landscape even more combustible, possibly even risking a revival of sectarian conflict. The demands of Sunni voters, from securing the presidency for a Sunni to diluting Iran’s influence, could make the already formidable task in Iraq of forming a coalition government even more difficult.

At polling stations near cratered buildings, past blast walls that still bore the pockmarks of bullets, the sentiments of voters who largely boycotted Iraq’s national elections in 2005 illustrated that divide.

Even as many cast ballots for the slate of Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and former prime minister, they condemned religious Shiite parties. With the invective once reserved for Americans, voters now attacked Iran, seen here as the patron of Iraq’s Shiite-led government.

“There’s no more war, it’s true, but we’re still not free,” Riyadh Khalaf, 47, a laborer, said as he stood near a polling station in the neighborhood of Andalus, where distant bombings reverberated through the morning. “We have an American occupation and an Iranian administration.”

A civil defense worker, Raad Mustafa, shouted, “We have to save our country.”

Ammar Ali, a police officer, interrupted them.

“We want someone who lives with us, someone who is from Iraq,” he said, carrying his rifle. “We don’t want the politicians who spend the night in Iran.”

In a day of remarkable images, none may have been more startling than those in Anbar Province, where just 3,375 people voted in January 2005, out of fear of insurgent threats or in protest of the occupation. People often cast the boycott then as a matter of survival, refusal to participate in an order that disenfranchised them. Similar words in another context were heard Sunday; failure to vote would amount to surrender.

“I voted for the sake of the generations to come,” said Yunus Adel, 22, a student. “My vote is going to determine my destiny. We have to have a voice.”

In another neighborhood, Mohammed Hatem walked past Martyrs School where, on April 28, 2003, American soldiers, saying they had been shot at, fired on a protest and killed 15 people, a seminal moment in unleashing an insurgency that would not end for five years. The school, on this day, was a polling station.

“The memories remain,” Mr. Hatem said. “But if you have the right, you have to exercise it.”

Voters in the Jolan neighborhood, the scene of some of the most intense fighting in 2004, barely flinched at blasts, which killed no one. Mosques that once served as refuge for insurgents blared messages imploring voters to defy the bombings.

Politics in Anbar are not for the faint-hearted. They tend toward the nasty, brutish and loud, where even nuances are conveyed as shouts. The governor lost his hand in an attack in December. A candidate near Falluja talked of the 11 attempts on his life as he might about car wrecks. Unfortunate, but they happen.

Nevertheless, in Anbar, as in predominantly Sunni regions elsewhere, politics have become far more diverse since the days when the Iraqi Islamic Party, a descendant of the venerable Muslim Brotherhood, dominated the regions. Since 2009, the province’s other currents — neo-Baathist and tribal — have rallied around lists loyal to Mr. Allawi and Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani, another secular Shiite.

“Everyone in Anbar — no, in Iraq — knows that the Islamic Party is lying,” said Sheik Aiffan Saadoun al-Aiffan, a tribal leader and candidate on Mr. Bolani’s list. “They deal with Iran, they steal money and they’ve lost the support of the people.”

Mr. Aiffan is part of a new breed of politician here, as traditional as he is worldly, with a kinetic energy that helped him, on a recent day, hit the campaign trail in the afternoon, greet a procession of relatives wearing what amounts to Anbar chic — headdress, sunglasses and bandolier — at night, then run an hour on the treadmill until 3:40 a.m.

He speaks with the entitlement of inherited power. “I’ll win, sure,” he said, with a touch of humor. “People like me, and God is with me.” And in a province where conversation, hours and hours of it, is the favorite pastime, he understands a constituency that deems politics’ ambiguous grays as effeminate.

Mr. Aiffan called the surrender “of even an inch of territory” in the border disputes with Kurds a sacrilege. (“This is our faith,” he said.) He threatened to fight the Islamic Party with guns if there was a hint of vote stealing. (“It could happen.”) And he insisted that the presidency was the right of a Sunni Arab, not a Kurd — someone like his ally, Ahmed Abu Risha, another tribal leader here who leads Mr. Bolani’s list.

“This time, the decisions will be different,” he said. “We can vote for what’s right, who’s good. We’ll make the right choices.” He looked at his computer, next to three cellphones, one of which got 150 text messages in an hour.

“The problem is,” he asked, “who will be with us in Baghdad?”

Even before the voting ended, politicians and voters speculated about the fragility of coalitions, in particular Mr. Allawi’s, which seemed to enjoy a groundswell of support as the one force that could counter Iraq’s religious Shiite parties. Some speculated that Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi’s candidates might leave it and return to the Iraqi Islamic Party, from which they split.

Others wondered whether Mr. Allawi, with his reputation for high-handedness, could keep the loyalty of emerging Sunni figures like Saleh al-Mutlaq, a member of Parliament banned from the election for ties to the Baath Party, and Rafea al-Issawi, a deputy prime minister who hails from one of Anbar’s biggest tribes.

“We won’t have a war, but it will be a conflict,” predicted Mohammed Zaal, an engineer in Falluja. “It will be a political conflict of Sunni against Sunni and Shiite against Shiite. Once they lose power, they’ll look for other ways to keep their influence.”

“I’m still optimistic,” he added, “but even in the civil war, I was optimistic.”