Top Sunni Party Quits Election

Iraq’s most prominent Sunni Muslim religious party announced Monday that it was withdrawing from next month’s parliamentary elections, saying that violence remains too grave to conduct the vote.

The move by the Iraqi Islamic Party threatens to deepen the political alienation of the nation’s Sunni Arabs, who make up about 20% of the population but were long favored under Saddam Hussein’s government. Many Sunnis have supported the insurgency and fear that the upcoming ballot will only cement their loss of influence as majority Shiite Muslims vote for members of their own sect. Yet Sunni support for and participation in a new government are considered crucial to stabilizing Iraq.

The Sunni party said Monday that it remained committed to the electoral process but that violence across the Sunni heartland north and west of Baghdad “that every day moves from bad to worse” made it necessary to delay the Jan. 30 vote for as long as six months.

“We need extra time,” party head Mohsen Abdel Hamid said. “This is not a boycott.... When the proper circumstances exist to enter into comprehensive elections, we’ll enter.”

The party’s pullout leaves several Sunni-dominated parties in the campaign, including the Constitutional Monarchy Movement, elder statesman Adnan Pachachi’s Independent Democratic Movement and interim President Ghazi Ajil Yawer’s party.

Last month, the Iraqi Islamic Party was among several Sunni parties that called for a delay in the voting. But Shiite politicians and U.S. officials have pushed to hold the balloting as scheduled. The Bush administration has launched a major diplomatic and political campaign to encourage Sunnis to vote and has even voiced support for a quota system to guarantee Sunni politicians seats in the new national assembly.

Ongoing violence in Al Anbar and Nineveh provinces, both Sunni Arab power centers, has greatly hindered electoral preparations. In Al Anbar, home to the rebellious cities of Fallouja and Ramadi, voter registration efforts are at a virtual standstill. In Mosul, capital of Nineveh in the north, clashes and attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces occur daily. Campaigning has been difficult, if not impossible.

An official with an international organization working on political party development, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Sunni Arab politicians “do have a legitimate beef” on the safety of Sunni-dominated areas.

Jaber Habib, a Baghdad University political science professor, said the threat of insurgent attacks in Al Anbar and Nineveh would distort the entire campaign process.

“Even their candidates can’t reveal their names or they might be killed,” he said. “How can they campaign like that?”

The violence cited by the Iraqi Islamic Party was underscored Monday morning by a car bomb attack on the Baghdad home of Abdelaziz Hakim, a likely candidate for prime minister and a top name on the unified Shiite electoral slate, or the United Iraqi Alliance, that’s expected to win a major share of the vote.

Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, was home at the time, but wasn’t injured in the attack, which killed at least nine and wounded more than 50, according to police. The blast left a 10-foot crater and destroyed several passing cars, but did minimal damage to the SCIRI building.

Hakim’s son Ammar gave an impromptu news conference at the blast site, blaming the attack on elements wishing to sow fitna -- an Arabic term for sectarian, ethnic or political conflict. But the attack, he said, only sharpened the party’s commitment to hold elections on schedule.

“We will not let an incident such as this one derail us from pursuing the elections,” Ammar Hakim said. “These elections in turn will pave the way to security and stability.”

Voters are scheduled to elect a 275-member transitional national assembly that will be charged with selecting a government, including a prime minister, and overseeing the drafting of a constitution. Other elections will be held to ratify the constitution and elect a new government in 2006.

But an electoral result that further minimizes the already shrunken political power of Sunni Arabs could serve to deepen the insurgency and extend Iraq’s violent spiral. In addition to the Iraqi Islamic Party’s pullout, the Muslim Scholars Assn., an influential hard-line Sunni group, has called for a boycott, rejecting as illegitimate any election under what it calls foreign occupation.

The party’s decision to withdraw from the Jan. 30 vote was announced before news of a recording purportedly from Osama bin Laden was aired. The message urged Sunnis to boycott the election and called anyone who participated an “infidel.” It was unclear how that message might affect Sunnis’ decision to take part in the balloting.

The Iraqi Islamic Party must still formally notify the United Nations-appointed Iraqi electoral commission. Until then, it remains a legitimate participant and potential vote-getter.

The White House responded to the withdrawal announcement by repeating its calls for full participation. “We’d like to see as broad a participation as possible. We’ve made that quite clear,” spokesman Trent Duffy said.

Efforts to coax Sunni politicians and voters into the electoral process have taken on increasing urgency as the vote nears. But ideas such as guaranteeing Sunnis seats in the transitional national assembly regardless of their vote totals have been met with some resistance.

Habib, the political analyst, said a quota system would only weaken the already marginal perceived legitimacy of the process. “I don’t see how to make that work with democracy,” he said.

But the democratic development organization official who requested anonymity said that many of the Sunni politicians’ moves -- including the Islamic party’s withdrawal and Pachachi’s November call for a postponement -- could be seen as maneuvers made with an eye toward a postelection negotiation process for greater representation.

Many of the politicians, she said, want to get their objections on the record now but will probably take part in the vote and then argue for some sort of postelection adjustment.

“They participate anyway. Whatever their percentage of the vote, they say, ‘We would have gotten more, and you should give us some seats,’ ” the official said. “There’s nothing to say that the size of the national assembly couldn’t go up. You could find a compromise.”

Suhail Affan and Raheem Salman of The Times’ Baghdad Bureau, Times staff writer Edwin Chen in Washington and Times wire services contributed to this report.