The fatwa has done little to ease the fear. Along the wood table in the center of the room is stack after stack of three-page applications for candidacy. About 400 people have applied, of whom 250 will be chosen. This week, the 45 or so candidates from Mosul asked that their addresses be left off. "If you don't, they'll slaughter us, absolutely," Adel quoted one as saying when he visited Tuesday.
Instead, in the space is written: "Iraqi Islamic Party, General Headquarters."
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)
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"We have to protect ourselves. We can't even do that," Abdel-Wahhab said. "How are we going to protect the candidates?"
On one of the walls is a white board with the candidates -- from Baghdad, Mosul, Diyala and Kirkuk in the north and Basra in the south. Men's names are in blue; women's in red.
The name of Nasir Ayef, a party leader, is still listed, despite his arrest by U.S. forces on Nov. 16. "Do I leave him on the list or do I take him off?" Abdel-Wahhab asked.
He shook his head and looked out at the mess.
A phone line was strung from a jack in the wall, up to the ceiling and over the table, where papers competed for space with staplers, hole punchers, paper clips and tape.
Sitting in plastic chairs, men smiled and laughed as they filled out application forms and filed papers in boxes and folders stacked on a crumbling wood shelf.
There was a dusty computer to the side, but most of the work at this headquarters was done by hand, laboriously, with the help of a dilapidated photocopier against the wall.
On the bulletin board was an article whose headline read: "Elections . . . between reality and hope."
"Only God will judge us -- not Sunnis, not the Americans," Abdel-Wahhab said as the day drew to an end.
"If the elections are transparent and conducted with integrity, and if people vote, it's a way to stop the fires burning in the country," he said. "If I'm sitting at home, alone in my house, I can't imagine that I can stop the fires from burning."
