Shiites Leading in Hussein's Home Province

The vote count for the province, which is still incomplete, confirmed that a Sunni boycott of the elections on Jan. 30 kept most Sunnis from the polls, allowing relatively small populations of Shiites and Kurds to dominate. Based on the results so far, it seems certain that Sunnis, who account for about 20 percent of Iraq's 28 million people, will have scant representation in the transitional national assembly.

The Sunni rejection of the political process was underscored by two suicide bombings on Iraqi police targets on Monday that killed at least 27 people in Mosul and Baquba, Sunni insurgent strongholds, and wounded at least 23, police officials in the cities said. In Baquba, 15 people, some of them lining up to apply to become policemen, were killed when two men in a car loaded with explosives tried to ram into the provincial police headquarters but detonated against a concrete barrier. As many as 12 policemen in Mosul died when a man with a body belt bomb blew himself up amid a crowd of policemen collecting their pay in a hospital courtyard.

The attacks on Monday were the bloodiest since the elections, and appeared to further dim American hopes that the insurgency might have lost some momentum in the wake of the large turnout, estimated by officials on election day at eight million people. The partial election returns released Monday showed that in Salahuddin Province in the north parties representing Shiites and Kurds, as well as the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite leader, took nearly 50 percent of the vote, with the closest Sunni leader, Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar, Iraq's interim president, taking 13 percent.

The pattern in the province, which includes Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's hometown, was further evidence that the overall election results were likely to be heavily skewed toward the Shiite and Kurdish populations, which turned out in big numbers in their strongholds in southern and northern Iraq. With Sunnis expected to be severely underrepresented in the 275-seat transitional assembly, and Shiites and Kurds dominant, many Iraqis fear that Sunni attitudes will harden, complicating efforts to move forward with the American blueprint for democracy in Iraq.

The results from the north allowed the main Kurdish political alliance to cut into the strong national lead established in earlier returns by the Shiite alliance that has as its patron the country's most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. With 4.6 million votes now tallied, the Shiite alliance still accounts for just more than 50 percent of the national vote, down from more than 70 percent in initial counts last week. The Kurdish alliance now has 25 percent, and Dr. Allawi, the interim prime minister, 13 percent.

The overall picture seems certain to change again as the election commission announces more results, against a tentative deadline for a final result in three to six days. Leaders of the Shiite alliance have said they are counting on increasing their vote share to at least 55 percent as more votes come in from eight predominantly Shiite southern provinces, including Basra, Iraq's second-largest city behind Baghdad. Partial returns for these provinces have totaled only 1.6 million votes, one for every five people, across an area where turnouts as high as 80 percent were reported on election day. Iraqi politicians say that could mean another 1.5 million southern votes yet to be counted, most of them for Shiite parties. The Shiite alliance has also polled strongly in Baghdad, where about one million votes have been counted, in a city with a population of at least six million. As many as one million more votes are also expected from the Kurdish north.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/international/middleeast/08iraq.html