BAGHDAD, December 12, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Iraqi election campaign saw political parties and blocks resorting to "creative and unconventional" methods to court voters as early voting in the war-ravaged country took off Monday, December 12.

Short Mobile Messages, sports events, and the distribution of perfume bottles were but a few of the new electoral campaign methods used in this regard.

Sunni Iraqi Concord Front (ICF) organized a number of sports events for its supporters nationwide with sportswear and sports equipment distributed among participants as trophies.

In Irbil, northern Iraq, groups of students marched streets calling voters to go to the polling stations and cast their vote for former premier Iyad Allawi's ICF.

"We are campaigning via SMS on mobiles and TV satellite channels," an ICF official told IslamOnline.net Monday.

We send messages to TV channels with fake names to add a popular taste to the ICF campaign, said the member of the information team of the Front.

"The candidate of the future," "give me your vote, I will make your dreams come true", "for a government taking good care of its citizens" and "no to corruption" are but few examples of the electoral slogans decorating the walls and streets of Mosul.

"In a country where bloodshed, kidnappings, killings, and bombings almost never let up, these slogans look like hoary old clichés," Udai Al-Husseini, an Iraqi analyst and rights activist, told IOL.

"The candidates are using overstated slogans to lure voters and they should have really put things into perspective and come up with realistic and credible platforms."

Iraqi Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr Al-Aloum who runs as a candidate of the Iraq of the Future block promised a ministerial committee would be formed to formulate a mechanism to distribute oil revenues among the population.

A fund of 500 billion Iraqi Dinars ($335 million) will distribute allowances among low-income brackets in addition to 900,000 unemployed people in Iraq, he told reporters.

Iraq's 15.5 million voters will elect on December 15 their first full-term legislature since the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime by US-led occupation forces in April 2003.

The parliament will in turn form a full-term, four-year government.

Still Iraqis have taken privilege of traditional election methods.

An Iraqi soldier gives the 'V' sign before voting Monday.

Meanwhile, three days before the rest of the country cast their ballots December 15, 300,000 Iraqis being treated in hospitals, those held in jails and members of the security forces voted for a total of 275 deputies who are to serve four-year terms.

"The election has begun," electoral commission member Farid Ayar told Agence France-Presse (AFP) Monday.

Around 200,000 members of Iraq's security forces were registered to vote Monday before taking up posts to protect the polls later this week.

Across the country, airports and borders will shut from Wednesday until Friday or Saturday, curfews extended and a ban on carrying weapons imposed even for civilians with permits.

A five-day public holiday will take effect from Tuesday and Jordan sealed its border with Iraq Monday for five days.

Five main coalitions based largely on sectarian or ethnic lines are dominating the election campaign across Iraq.

They are the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the Kurdish alliance of the Democratic Kurdistan Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Sunni Iraqi Concord Front (ICF) and former premier Iyad Allawi’s secular-Shiite Iraqi National List (INL).