Election News
The Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group, appears finally to have gotten off the fence and decided definitively to contest the elections in January.
Iyad Allawi’s decision to start trials against high Baath officials, however, may further roil ethnic relations in Iraq, since a recital of Baath atrocities just before the elections may help provoke Shiite-Sunni or Kurdish-Shiite violence.
As it was, another mass grave was discovered near the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah on Tuesday.
Muqtada al-Sadr’s group is saying that they are neutral on the elections and will neither support them nor oppose them. Shaikh Bahadili, al-Sadr’s spokesman in Basra, had earlier argued for a boycott, according to al-Zaman.