Lottery Sets Order Of Ballot in Iraq

Officials Alarmed by Surge in Violence

Election officials spin a drum filled with numbered balls during a lottery to set the order of registrants on the multi-page ballot for Iraq's Jan. 30 elections. (Ceerwan Aziz -- Reuters)

BAGHDAD, Dec. 20 -- The machinery of Iraqi elections churned smoothly on Monday: Over and over, a plexiglass tumbler spun effortlessly on its axle, then eased to a graceful stop as a smiling young woman with frosted hair and lipstick reached inside for another Ping-Pong ball.

In the lottery organized by Iraq's election commission, the number on each ball announced the place each registered entrant will hold on a Jan. 30 ballot that is expected to run several pages. The pole position went to the Independent Iraqi Alliance, a little-known group offering just 47 candidates for the 275 seats in a parliament that will organize a new government and oversee the drafting of a constitution.

But a day after massive car bombings killed 66 people in two southern cities and three election workers were killed execution-style on a busy Baghdad street, Iraqi officials worried aloud that violence aimed at preventing the vote is surging.

"My fear is there will be no election, not the results of the election," said Ibrahim Jafari, a vice president in the interim government and head of the Dawa party, which has joined with other prominent Shiite groups in a unified slate known as the United Iraqi Alliance.

In Najaf, the Shiite Muslim holy city 90 miles south of Baghdad where dozens were killed by a car bomb Sunday, Maj. Ghalib Jazaeri, the police chief, said that several suspects were in custody, and that some had admitted involvement. Jazaeri also claimed, without offering evidence, that several suspects acknowledged having connections to Iranian intelligence, and another to Syrian intelligence.

In Karbala, where a bomb detonated Sunday shortly before the Najaf blast, a driver on Monday threw a hand grenade at police manning a checkpoint, said a local police officer, 1st Lt. Hussein Asadi. There were no injuries and the driver was arrested.

The attacks in the sacred Shiite cities were widely seen as calculated to fan conflict between Iraq's majority Shiite population, whose leaders have actively promoted the elections, and the Sunni Muslim minority, whose religious leaders have called for a boycott or postponement of the vote.

Shiite leaders insisted they will not be provoked. One prominent cleric cited an earlier, even more devastating wave of bombings at Shiite shrines during a religious festival, which failed to incite sectarian conflict.

"The mass killing in Karbala, Najaf, Kadhimiyah and other cities did not succeed in inciting sectarian strife, and this is evidence of the terrorists' isolation," said Abdul Aziz Hakim, who heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, another member of the United Iraqi Alliance, organized under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's top religious leader.

"This will not stop us from proceeding in the way of democracy," said Adnan Zurfi, the provincial governor of Najaf.

The brazen killing of the election workers raised difficult questions about the ability of the government to protect the 6,000 employees expected to conduct the ballot.

The three workers, one of whom was a senior official in the west Baghdad election office, were killed after being pulled from a car at a traffic circle near their office, located close to a Haifa Street neighborhood rife with insurgents. Witnesses said 30 armed men attacked with assault rifles and hand grenades. The attack "was clearly a prepared ambush," said one election official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Of course the mood in the [election commission] office was somber yesterday."

Asked at a roundtable with foreign reporters whether Iraq's interim government can protect its election workers, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi demurred. Allawi, a Shiite who heads the Iraqi National Accord, a secular party, said Iraq is already struggling to build indigenous forces to secure and police major cities, including Mosul, the country's third largest city. He hinted of plans to mount an offensive against insurgents there who drove off the local police force in a single day last month.

Intimidation has proved a powerful weapon for insurgents. Senior and mid-level employees of the civilian government are killed almost daily, and attacks on Iraqis who agree to work on U.S.-funded projects have slowed a reconstruction effort that American and Iraqi officials describe as already sluggish.

The head of the election commission, Hussain Hindawi, sounded a fatalistic note. As he left the ballot lottery, he told reporters that the panel had appealed to the government to deploy Iraqi security forces for election workers' protection. "We have no protection because we work everywhere in the country," he said. "We have more than 6,000 employees. Life goes on, and we have to do our job. We have to prepare for the election. There is no other alternative."

Hakim, the Shiite cleric and candidate, said at a news conference that his party could provide 100,000 militia fighters to protect polling stations. There was no immediate response from the interim government, which repeatedly has said only uniformed Iraqi forces would guard polling places, with heavily armed U.S. forces standing by to provide backup from a discreet distance.

But the offer had the potential to fan a pre-election controversy over the role Iraq's neighbors are suspected of playing in the election. Hakim's group was headquartered in Tehran for more than a decade, and some Iraqis refer to members of its Badr Brigade militia as "Iranians." Last week, Defense Minister Hazim Shalan accused the entire Shiite list of candidates of being a Trojan horse for Iran, an incendiary comment that Allawi on Monday dismissed as the minister's personal opinion.

Meanwhile, Allawi said he disagreed with the de-Baathification policy, pushed by the United States, that punishes former members of President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Allawi joined the party as a medical student in the 1960s.

"The distinction should be made between those who committed crimes and those who had to join the Baath Party," Allawi said. He said the tribal leaders and former Baath Party members he has met acknowledge that the party is as good as dead, yet cling to its structure as a means to fight the U.S. military presence, which they see as threatening. Allawi voiced hope that his lobbying would lure tribal leaders "on the periphery of the insurgency" to channel their energies into the election.

"We have reached a phase where we can see a distinction between the terrorists and the insurgents," he said. "We hope this will be the beginning of a divide which will help to bring an end.''

Special correspondents Saad Sarhan in Najaf and Khalid Jaffar and Naseer Nouri in Baghdad contributed to this report.