NAJAF, Iraq, March 6, (Agencies): A car bomb targeting Iranian pilgrims killed three people in Iraq’s holiest city Saturday on the eve of the war-shattered nation’s general election which al-Qaeda has threatened to wreck.
The blast near a Shiite shrine in Najaf, which local officials said killed two Iranian pilgrims and an Iraqi and wounded at least 54 people, came despite a massive nationwide security operation in the run-up to Sunday’s vote.
It gutted four pilgrim buses, mangled cars and left the area spattered with blood, smashed glass and torn clothes, and blew out the windows of nearby hotels that host the thousands of Iranians who flock there every month.
“We had gathered all the pilgrims in the car park, and they were getting into the buses when the explosion took place, and killed and injured many visitors,” said Hussein Banahi, an Iranian tour guide.
“The attack carries the prints of al-Qaeda and Saddamists,” said Faed al-Shimmary of the provincial council in Najaf, which hosts the shrine of Imam Ali, the Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law and a revered figure in Shiite Islam.

Thirty-seven of the wounded were Iranians, local officials said, adding that the blast was just 500 metres from the shrine in the city that lies south of Baghdad.
The attack on Iranian pilgrims drew fire from Tehran, with Iranian foreign ministry spokes-man Ramin Mehmanparast condemning it as an “inhuman and criminal act.”
The final days of campaigning for Sunday’s polls, the second parliamentary election since US-led troops ousted dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, have been overshadowed by a series of suicide bombings in Baghdad and the city of Baquba.
The Islamic state of Iraq, the Qaeda front here, said in a statement Friday it was imposing a “curfew” on Sunday and anyone who dared defy it would “expose himself to the anger of Allah and... all kinds of weapons of the mujahedeen.”
Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Qaeda front, had threatened last month to disrupt by “military means” the poll which looks set to see minority Sunnis vote en masse, in stark contrast to their 2005 election boycott.

Friday’s statement from Qaeda, an extremist Sunni group that views Shiites as heretics, came as voting was already under way for an estimated 1.4 million Iraqis living abroad in 16 different countries.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said voting was going well and that Washington would follow through with its plan to halve its troop numbers in Iraq to 50,000 within six months.
Some 200,000 Iraqi police and soldiers will be on duty in Baghdad alone to provide security for the vote, the country’s borders and its airports will be shut for the day and all cars banned from the streets.
Iraqi religious leaders used Friday prayers in mosques to order citizens to vote and safeguard democracy in the war-shattered state.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, the Shiite head of the State of Law Alliance, boasted this week he was “certain” of victory.

But he faces stiff competition from Shiite former premier Iyad Allawi, whose secular Iraqiya list has strong support in Sunni areas.
Also competing for the top job are former deputy premier Ahmed Chalabi, who was once favoured but is now loathed by Washington, Shiite Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi and Finance Minister Baqer Jaber Solagh.
Iraq’s fragmented political scene virtually ensures that no single party will emerge with the 163 seats needed to form a government on its own and the ensuing horse-trading to form a governing coalition is likely to be protracted.
One thing that is almost certain is that the new prime minister will be from the Shiite majority that was oppressed by the Sunni dictator Saddam but which now dominates the political scene.
The US military sees Sunday’s poll as a crucial precursor to withdrawing its combat troops by September. It says that after that date it hopes to have only 50,000 soldiers here.
Currently there are about 96,000 US troops in the country but they are mostly confined to their bases under the terms of a security agreement that saw them leave Iraq’s cities, towns and villages in June last year.

Tension
 A powerful Sunni politician Saturday warned sectarian tensions will continue in Iraq for years and may deepen if the new government fails to end discrimination in the Shiite-dominated army and police.
Iyad al-Samarraie, the parliamentary speaker, said that while the violence between Sunnis and Shiites which killed tens of thousands had decreased, unease would simmer if Sunday’s general election did not deliver a just government.
“It very much depends on the policies of the new government,” the 64-year-old engineer told AFP in an interview in his Baghdad home on the banks of the river Tigris.
“A wise government can reduce it within a year. But an unwise government might even make it worse,” said Samarraie, who is a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party and an election candidate in the capital.
Some politicians have recognised the problem and are willing to tackle it, but there are “others (who) are not very much interested and maybe see there is a chance to gain through such behaviour,” he said.
But whatever happens after the parliamentary election, the second since US-led troops ousted Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, he said he believed sectarian tensions would not go away.
“In the coming years I think some sort of tension will continue between the communities about whether they have full rights or not,” said Samarraie, who spent two decades in exile after Saddam’s forces cracked down on his party.
With around 800,000 Iraqis employed in the security forces, and with the state accounting for around half of all jobs here, the stakes are high.
There are no official figures on how public sector jobs are split between Iraq’s religious and ethnic communities, but Sunnis complain that the Shiites are disproportionately represented.
If that is true, it is partly due to the Sunnis’ previous refusal to join the police and army, which was sparked by their resentment at the rise to power after Saddam’s ouster of the long-oppressed Shiite majority.

But many Sunnis have now begun engaging with the state, and Sunni voters are expected to turn out in force on Sunday, in stark contrast to the last parliamentary election in 2005 which they mostly boycotted.
That boycott left most Sunnis in the political wilderness, deepened the sectarian divide and heightened the deadly violence between Sunnis and Shiites that fell only in the past two years.
A Shiite is almost certain to become prime minister.
But in this poll, whose final days of campaigning have been rocked by suicide attacks that killed dozens, many competing blocs have shunned sectarian politics and included candidates from across the political and ethnic spectrum.
Samarraie, who speaks fluent English, said however that there was still a long way to go before all communities would feel they are getting equal rights.
The Sunni-dominated Iraqi Accord Front to which his party belongs is unlikely to be one of the dominant blocs to emerge from Sunday’s vote.

But it will demand that discrimination be addressed when the leading blocs seek its support in forming a government, said Samarraie.
“The main issue we would want to see the government address is that the balance in the administration, the army and the police is not proper,” he said.
Samarraie also warned that negotiations to form the new administration would take at least two months and possibly much longer and could lead to a “political vacuum” while the talks drag on.
“I think there will be three main blocs. The fourth one will be the Kurds. and all three will try to see if they are able to bring the Kurds with them,” he said.
The Kurdish alliance from Iraq’s autonomous northern region is the junior partner in the current government and hopes to sell its support in return for an acceptable deal on oil rights and the sovereignty of the city of Kirkuk.

Militia
Many Iraqis in areas where anti-US cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army once held sway say young men who had worn the militia’s signature black shirts have returned ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary elections, albeit in smaller numbers and a low profile.
Many Sunnis in flashpoint neighborhoods say they are lying low or temporarily moving to safer areas as they wait in fear that the elections will spark a new sectarian backlash against them.
Omar al-Jubouri, a 26-year-old Sunni university worker, saw some of the same Shiite militiamen who forced him to flee his home five years ago back in his south Baghdad neighborhood.
“I sensed the threat, so we locked the house and left,” said al-Jubouri, who took his wife and two children out of Abu Dshir, a Shiite enclave in the mainly Sunni Dora district, to stay with relatives elsewhere in the capital.
“I fled because I don’t want to be terrified again like in 2005,” he said. “We escaped so my children can continue to have a father and not become orphans.”

Ex-Mahdi Army members appear to have been emboldened by the prospect of an Iraq free of the US military and by al-Sadr’s decision to join a Shiite-led alliance that may become the single largest bloc in the next legislature. The alliance could earn the right to nominate the next prime minister.
The radical cleric’s movement fought bloody battles with Sunni militants and the Americans and was blamed for some of the worst retaliatory sectarian violence. The elections could give it more leverage than it has had since it burst on the scene after the 2003 US-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.
Bloodshed between death squads from the two rival Islamic sects brought Iraq to the brink of civil war before a US troop buildup in 2008 helped rout the extremists from both sides.
Violence has dropped sharply and bullet-riddled bodies are no longer found on the streets by the dozens. But war-related killings have increased in the run-up to Sunday’s elections, and intimidation appears to have made a comeback in some Baghdad areas.

Abdul-Azeem Mohsen, a Sunni, last week received a letter threatening him with death if he did not leave his home in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Baiyaa. The once religiously mixed neighborhood saw some of the fiercest sectarian cleansing that ended with the Shiites in control.
“My neighbors pledged to stand by me against the militiamen,” said the father of five, who trades in wholesale groceries in the city’s Shorja market across the Tigris River on the eastern side of the city.
Mohsen is not taking any chances. He says he plans to sell his home, even below market prices, and buy another in the Sunni district of Amariyah.
“Fleeing is my only choice,” he said, “fleeing from one uncertainty to another so I can keep my family alive. What else can I do?”
Sunday’s election for a 325-seat legislature has been billed as a key step in Iraq’s democratic evolution. Iraqis hope it helps them achieve national reconciliation at a time when the United States is pressing ahead with plans to withdraw all its forces by the end of next year.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who in 2008 initiated several offensives against Shiite and Sunni militant groups, is seeking a second term in office. He leads an alliance that is dominantly Shiite and led by his Dawa Party. He refused to join the Supreme Council and the Sadrists in one coalition.

Candidates
The decision by a Shiite-led vetting panel to disqualify more than 400 candidates from running because of alleged ties to Saddam’s outlawed Baath party also has left many Sunnis seething. They see the move as a thinly veiled attempt to undermine their minority community, which dominated Iraq under Saddam.
Some Shiites are worried that extremist Sunnis will respond to the elections with bloodshed.
Ali Jabar Nasser, a Shiite who lives in the Sunni part of Dora, said he and 10 of his Shiite neighbors recently installed a system that allows each household to sound an alarm if anyone sees armed Sunni militants. They also take turns patrolling the street.
“We are worried and think the elections can lead to a deterioration in security,” said Nasser.
In one of the worst recent incidents, eight members of one Shiite family were shot and beheaded last month in the village of Wahda, a mixed Shiite-Sunni village south of Baghdad.
Al-Sadr, who considered past elections illegitimate, has joined a Shiite alliance led by an Iranian-backed party — the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. He has endorsed this election as a means of “political resistance,” raising the likelihood of a large turnout by Sadrists and the possibility that the alliance could emerge as Iraq’s strongest political force after Sunday’s vote.

Al-Sadr’s movement has returned to using the “Sadrist Trend” — its official name — on its campaign propaganda material. In previous elections, the movement said it was only backing selected independents.
Iraqis generally vote along sectarian lines. Shiites make up 60 to 65 percent of the country’s estimated 28 million people, while Sunni Arabs and Kurds make up about 15 percent each. The rest are Christians, Turkomen and several other tiny communities.
Some of the tens of thousands of campaign banners and posters that have sprung out in Baghdad over the past few weeks have a distinct sectarian slant; some residents also blame them for stoking the tensions.
The Shiite head of the committee that banned the candidates, Ali al-lami, has this to say on his election posters: “No, to all forms of terror, corruption and the criminal Baath from now on.”
On his posters, former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari invokes the name of Imam Hussein, a seventh-century saint deeply revered by Shiites.

The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council is thought be behind the hundreds of posters in Shiite areas of Baghdad bearing the image of the country’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, in a move designed to use the name of the much revered cleric to attract voters.
In a clear provocation to the Sunnis, former Deputy Health Minister Hakim al-Zamili, one of two former government officials accused of allowing Shiite death squads to use ambulances and government hospitals to carry out kidnappings and killings, is running for parliament in the Shiite-led coalition led by the Supreme Council and the Sadrists. The charges against the two were dropped two years ago.
The number of Iraqis killed in war-related violence increased by 44 percent — to at least 255 — between January and February.
Figures compiled by The Associated Press show that at least 30 unidentified bodies were found in January and February across the country. That was still a low number compared with past years but a number large enough to suggest that sectarian killings may not have entirely ceased.