Iraq campaign season becomes a test of faith

BAGHDAD -- As Iraq's campaign season winds into its final week, voters will have to make their choices in a fog of limited information.

Candidates will not hold rallies because of the constant violence and death threats against them. Instead, they are relying on religious and tribal networks and Islamic holiday feasts to spread their message.

Laconic posters and television ads round out the campaign. As a result, people's perceptions of the candidates, and their understanding of the election, are as vague as the candidates' platforms.

Eternal damnation has emerged as a central campaign tactic in the run-up to the election next Sunday, with Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims hearing opposing but equally stark messages emanating from the capital's minarets: You will be damned if you vote, damned if you don't.

At Friday prayers at the Shi'ite Boratha Mosque in Baghdad, the imam ordered his listeners to vote for the United Iraqi Alliance, a grand coalition of Shi'ite candidates, saying he was speaking for the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the supreme authority for Iraqi Shi'ites.

''Whoever does not vote for the Iraqi United Coalition should prepare to answer for themselves in front of God on Judgment Day," bellowed the imam, Jalal Al-Deen Al-Sagheer.

Just to the west in Ramadi and Fallujah, Sunni preachers ordered people to boycott the elections, saying it was their religious duty to refuse a ballot organized by ''American occupiers."

Mixed in with this fiery brand of faith-based politics is a torrent of other campaigning that comes with little actual engagement between candidates and voters.

Posters deck the capital, advertising a slate or list of candidates by its number on the ballot, but usually carrying no description of the party or its platform. There are hundreds of slates with virtually indistinguishable names like United Iraqi Alliance or Allied Iraqi Union.

Some candidates are running slick television advertisements, and campaigns promise that this week, before the vote, there will be televised debates.

But the anemic campaign and the limited avenues for candidates and voters to intersect is spelling trouble.

Just over half of Iraqis polled even know when election day is, according to the International Republican Institute, a nonprofit group. The same poll suggested that 46 percent of Iraqis believe that no political party represents them and that only two-thirds plan to vote.

Muslim Yasin, a schoolteacher, clutched a small flier he had been handed when he left his house yesterday in the Hay Jihad area of Baghdad. Beside a picture of a large man in a black suit -- the leader of the Iraqi National Unity Gathering, ballot number 146 -- a legend declared: ''Iraq is our house, we build it and protect it."

''I have no idea who this man is, or what his party is," Yasin said. ''For him, I am supposed to go and vote?"

An unemployed laborer, Hamza Saleh, 40, delivered his own unenthusiastic endorsement of Iraq's first free election in decades: ''I will vote because it's better than nothing."

Asked whom he would vote for, Saleh said he had no idea. ''I'll vote for anyone. I don't know who the candidates are. I will decide at the time of the voting for whom to vote."

More than half of those surveyed said the Iraqi government had failed to make the country any safer since taking office in June, according to the International Republican Institute poll, which questioned 1,903 Iraqis between Dec. 26 and Jan. 7.

But the survey's most telling results came when it asked Iraqis about the electoral campaign.

Religious figures, friends, and family ranked as the most trusted sources of information about the election, much higher than the elections commission, the Iraqi government, or any media.

One-third of those surveyed said they believed the solution to Iraq's security woes was the departure of the US-led multinational forces (the other top choices were ''hiring more police officers" and ''closing Iraq's borders.")

In Sunni areas, 20 percent of those surveyed said they were very likely to vote -- a result in line with fears expressed by Western officials and Iraqi government leaders that a roiling insurgency would effectively disenfranchise the Sunni Triangle because widespread fighting would intimidate the population and keep people from the polls.

The US invasion of Fallujah in November leveled much of that city, and most residents have yet to return, staying with relatives and friends or in refugee camps in Baghdad.

''The people of Fallujah are still homeless," said Brigadier General Samir Rashid, a retired police chief from Fallujah. ''How can we worry about elections?"

A coalition official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the design of the transitional Iraqi government would protect Sunni interests even if their turnout is low.

For example, any three provinces can veto the constitution being written over the next year, giving the Sunni Triangle, which includes four provinces, major clout. The National Assembly must also approve a new government with a two-thirds majority.

''The whole structure of the . . . institutions is designed to achieve some kind of consensus," the official said. ''It was designed for the Kurds, but works well enough for the Sunnis."

While Iraqis in the violence-plagued Sunni center of the country appear to be leaning against taking part in the elections, majority Shi'ites are hearing a much different message from their leaders.

Sistani has issued many fatwas, or religious decrees, ordering Shi'ites that it is their religious duty to vote. In a written order circulating in Shi'a mosques, he emphasized the importance of the vote by saying that men cannot prevent their wives from going to the polls.

Sagheer, the imam at the Shi'a Boratha Mosque, said every good Muslim must brave the expected wave of violence on election day.

''We will not surrender to the terrorists even if we are cut to pieces, even if their bullets and explosions will be able to reach all of us, men, women, children, and the elderly," he said in his sermon.

At the al Haq mosque in Ramadi, meanwhile, a Sunni cleric told worshipers at Friday prayers that their compact with God required boycotting elections he said were rigged by the Americans.

''We will not participate in these elections . . . because the American forces will bring us a secular leader who doesn't recognize God," said the cleric, Jalaluddin Ahmed. ''This, we do not want, and we will fight it."

Beyond the battle for votes and boycotts being waged in the mosques, other political parties are looking for ways to win votes. In the absence of straightforward campaign events, candidates have had to be resourceful.

On Friday, for instance, Sharif Ali not so subtly transformed an Eid feast celebrating the end of the hajj, or holy pilgrimage to Mecca, into a campaign event for his party. Ali heads the Constitutional Monarchy party, claiming to be the successor to Iraq's king, deposed in a revolution in 1958.

Tribal sheiks, retired officers of the Iraqi Army, and some professionals from restive Sunni areas lounged in Ali's palace on the Tigris, while men in traditional, 1920s-era, baggy brown pantaloons served bedouin coffee, their utensils hanging from leather bandoliers.

Meanwhile, a woman in Western dress distributed campaign material, including the Constitutional Monarchy party platform and calendars with Ali's image alongside that of Sistani's -- a confusing juxtaposition, given that Ali endorses a secular government that favors neither Sunnis nor Shi'ites.

''This is an Eid celebration, but of course, it is also part of the campaign," said Ali's top adviser, Faisal Qaragholi.

Like most candidates, Ali's security fears have limited his movements, although he has met with sheiks in Sadr City and the upscale Mansur District of Baghdad. Mostly he campaigns through advertisements, including four huge billboards in the capital, and at events like Friday's feast.

Tawfik al-Fraon, a retired general from Saddam Hussein's army, declared his allegiance to Ali while sipping coffee in the would-be king's lounge. His loyalty sprang not from the meticulously documented party platform, he said, but from nostalgia.

After Fraon left his seat to mingle, his friend Sheik Sami al-Dulaimi, a tribal leader from Tikrit, leaned forward and said most of his fellow tribesmen were supporting the prime minister, Iyad Allawi, or the president, Ghazi al-Yawer.

In the absence of mass campaigning, networks have become conduits for political groupings; the Dulaimi tribe, for example, includes Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, Kurds and Arabs, Christians and Muslims.

''We officially support Iyad Allawi's list and Sheik Ghazi Yawer's list," Dulaimi said. ''We encourage our people to vote at conferences, meetings with people, and in our statements to the media."

Anne Barnard of the Globe staff and correspondent Sa'ad al-Izzi reported from Baghdad, and a Globe correspondent reported from Ramadi. Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.