Hazards On Trail For Sunni Politicians

Party Feeling Harassed By Iraqi Rebels, U.S.

An Iraqi man smokes at a coffee shop in Baghdad. The Iraqi Islamic Party has its main office in the capital, where one of its leaders was arrested recently. (Ceerwan Aziz -- Reuters)

BAGHDAD, Nov. 25 -- Instilled with an engineer's precision and an idealist's defiant optimism, Saad Abdel-Wahhab looks out at the campaign trail that begins at the headquarters of his political party, one of the few Sunni Muslim groups that have chosen to defy a boycott and take part in Iraq's nationwide elections in January. Along the way, he sees a gantlet.

In the northern city of Mosul, the stronghold of his Iraqi Islamic Party, insurgents overran a government warehouse and torched hundreds of boxes of voter registration forms. The party's candidates in the city begged Abdel-Wahhab and other election organizers not to print candidate addresses on applications, fearful their houses would be bombed.

One of the party's candidates for a local council was slain this week, and a militant Sunni group, the Ansar al-Sunna Army, has warned it would attack candidates as well as voters. That's from the insurgents.

Abdel-Wahhab said he has to contend, too, with U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies, who in a pre-dawn raid last week arrested one of the party's most prominent leaders at his home in Baghdad. By Abdel-Wahhab's count, U.S. and Iraqi forces have raided five of the Iraqi Islamic Party's offices. He fears another raid on the white stucco, two-story headquarters in Baghdad. His response: He and others copied campaign documents and dispersed them for safekeeping in colleagues' homes.

"We're between the hammer and the anvil, between Ansar al-Sunna and the Americans," said Abdel-Wahhab, a stocky man in a blue three-piece suit with a trimmed beard and a cheerful mien, as he sat at the party headquarters. "The resistance considers us agents of the Americans, and the Americans think we're working for the resistance."

He shook his head, then turned his palms upward. "We're stuck in the middle," he said.

Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority, long the country's rulers and now on the brink of disenfranchisement, faces a conundrum that has divided it as elections approach for a 275-member National Assembly, which will appoint a government and oversee the assuredly contentious process of drafting a permanent constitution. Abdel-Wahhab's party is at the center of that dispute, and its success or failure could, its leaders believe, determine whether the elections are viewed as legitimate, an elusive quality in postwar Iraq.

At issue is an age-old question of the most effective way to bring about change: from within or without.

While many of Iraq's Shiite Muslims have embraced the vote as a way to ensure the power they believe they deserve as the majority, a number of influential Sunni groups have endorsed a boycott. It is a question of principle, they say, since no election can be truly fair as long as the U.S. occupation prevails. That position has been taken up by the powerful Association of Muslim Scholars, which claims to represent 3,000 Sunni mosques in Iraq. It has been endorsed by dozens of Sunni groups, as well as a handful of Shiite factions and personalities, who contend that even if the vote is held, violence racking Sunni regions will keep voters from the polls.

"I don't see a lot of enthusiasm for the elections, and if they cannot break the resistance, people will fear to participate," said Wamidh Nadhmi, the spokesman for the Iraqi National Founding Conference, an umbrella group of parties that has joined the boycott. "I can't predict the future, but I don't think you'll find queues waiting to cast their votes."

The Iraqi Islamic Party, a conservative, religious group that was underground before the U.S. invasion, seconds many of the worries espoused by the groups boycotting. The party's leaders fear their core constituency will not vote -- nearly all the registration centers have been shut down in restive, Sunni-dominated Anbar province in western Iraq -- and they are suspicious of American intentions.

At the very least, said party spokesman Ayad Sammarai, elections should be delayed and the Americans should negotiate with the opposition. After this month's assault on Fallujah, which destroyed hundreds of buildings in a city that had been under insurgent rule since April, voting, much less campaigning, would be difficult, perhaps impossible, he said.

"The people saw their neighbors, families and houses destroyed," Sammarai said. "They're in no mood to go on with the vote."

But so far, the party has insisted it will continue with the election, and the task has fallen to Abdel-Wahhab, a chemical engineer and father of three imbued with what might best be termed optimistic fatalism -- what will be will be, but I hope it will work out.