An Iraqi puts up election posters on a street in Baghdad. (Reuters)

By Samir Haddad, IOL Correspondent

BAGHDAD, December 3, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Assassinations, kidnappings, defacing candidate posters and trading barbs are casting a shadow over the Iraqi political landscape less than two weeks before the country’s legislative polls.

The Assyrian Democratic Reform Movement announced Friday, December 2, that its candidate Sarmad Bihnam Ibrahim was gunned down in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

Ahmad Shalaan Matar, a senior member of the Iraqi National List of former prime minister Iyad Allawi, was also assassinated on Wednesday, November 30, and his son injured in a drive-by shooting in northern Basra.

Allawi’s list lost a second trump card when unknown assailants shot dead one of his energetic campaign managers in the southern city of Basra, when he was sticking up Allawi’s posters on walls.

The Sunni Islamic Party also had its share of the violence with two prominent candidates killed, Iyad Al-Ezi and Nuzad Taher, in west and north Iraq respectively.

Four main coalitions based largely on sectarian or ethnic lines will dominate the campaign for Iraq's December 15 general elections.

The coalitions are: the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the Sunni Iraqi Concord Front (ICF), the Kurdish alliance of the Democratic Kurdistan Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Iraqi National List.

The election will lead to a parliament with full constitutional powers for four years.

Kidnappings, Torture  

Kidnappings and torture have also marred pre-election Iraq.

Former governor of the Shiite holy city of An-Najaf Adnan Al-Zarfi said that his brother Hussein was kidnapped from his house in the southern city of Kufa.

"The kidnapping is part of serious threats to members and candidates of my 696 List," he told the local Al-Fayha TV channel.

The leader of the Al-Shams Al-Iraqiya list, Tawfiq Al-Yasseri, was kidnapped near his home in Al-Yarmouk district, west of Baghdad, to be released three days later.

The Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), one of the most influential Sunni bodies in occupied Iraq, slammed anew the killing and torture of Sunni Arabs at the hands of US and Iraqi troops.

It rejected in a statement on Saturday any talk about elections before releasing all Sunni prisoners and ceasing attacks on houses, threatening to pull out of a tentative agreement reached in reconciliation talks in Cairo.

"The association finds itself forced to reconsider the decisions reached at the Cairo conference," Abdel Salam Al-Kubaisi, an AMS spokesman, told a news conference.

"What is happening on the ground differs completely from what was promised."

Kubaisi made the remarks after displaying pictures of a dead man and his child who were killed by the Scorpion Forces of the Shiite-led Interior Ministry.

It was the latest charge made by the association, which has repeatedly accused the government of condoning hit squads that torture and kill Sunnis.

Sunni candidates, who boycotted general elections on January 30, campaigned heavily this time in order to weigh in on crucial decisions.

War of Banners  

A defaced poster of Allawi on a Baghdad street.

Candidate election banners and posters have a battle of its own. Few of the banners remained intact as rivals tended to deface and tear apart each others’.

The UIA went further by portraying Allawi as a candidate with two faces, one for Allawi and another for Saddam, the London-based Al-Quds Press news agency reported.

Pictures of former defense minister Hazem Al-Shalan have been covered in black graffiti reading "a spy and a swindler".

The UIA also mixed religion with politics, displaying photos of Shiite leader Mohammad Baqer Al-Hakim, who was assassinated in 203, with a phrase reading that the Al-Marjiyah or religious authority blessed the alliance.

Iraq's top Shiite scholar, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has urged Iraqis to support "religious" candidates, his office said on Saturday.

The instructions from Sistani, a reclusive spiritual figure with a strong influence among the Shiites, carry tremendous weight and are likely to have an impact on voters.

Politicians of Iraq’s ethnic and religious rainbow further traded barbs ahead of the polls.

The spokesman for the Iraqi National List, Thaer Al-Naqib, has ridiculed Deputy Prime Minister and once Washington’s darling Ahmad Chalabi’s talk about the Iraqi army and its independence, holding him accountable for dissolving the military establishment.

Naqib further had harsh words for the ruling Shiite and Kurdish coalition government, accusing it of being responsible for a sluggish economy and deteriorating security conditions.

The National and Islamic Front, for its part, called the upcoming polls a "farce because it will result in a US-handpicked parliament and an Iraqi Karzai," it said in reference to US-backed Afghan President Hamid Karzai.