KUFA, IRAQ — On election day, Sheik Wahid Issawi held court in his mudheef, a tribal guesthouse tucked among the family's acres of date groves and rice fields. Relatives filed in, kissed his hand and cheek and asked his guidance on how to vote in Saturday's provincial elections. His answer was simple: Choose the list of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.
If Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party proves victorious in Najaf province, the spiritual capital of Shiite Islam, the graying patriarch will have played a key role. The tribal leader, who claims 80,000 adherents, functions in a manner similar to that of an old-fashioned ward boss in the U.S., delivering his district's vote to his party.
"The prime minister became the right man to protect the Iraqi state," Issawi told The Times on a visit to his home. "He is a strong man, courageous and a son of the tribes."
Issawi is one of several leading Shiite sheiks with whom Maliki has curried favor. The prime minister has sought to boost his party, which favors a strong central government, over another Shiite faction, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which supports a semiautonomous Shiite Muslim region in the south.
Maliki has named Issawi to head a local tribal body funded by his office, and appointed one of the sheik's sons to a job in Baghdad. He has summoned Issawi to conferences in the capital city, where he has listened to his ideas for the nation's future. Observers say that if Maliki wins a large share of provincial council seats in the oil-rich southern provinces, it is in large part because of his diligent wooing of men like Issawi.
"It was a very strategic step for Maliki and for his movement to bring votes to his [party] list," said Sheik Fatih Kashif Ghitaa, head of Al Thaqalayn Center for Strategic Studies, an Iraqi think tank, considered close to the government.
The courting of the Shiite tribes has given Maliki a boost in the electoral race, and he appears in a dead heat for provinces where his Dawa Party was weak only a year ago. But his patronage deals could have harmful effects on how the country is ruled.
"They [the tribes] are expecting many things, especially contracts. . . . All of it is a [form of] corruption, but who is going to be the king of the corruption -- the tribal leaders or the government?" Ghitaa asked.
The maneuvers have elicited outrage from the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, or SIIC, which controls Najaf's provincial council and five other local governments in the south that Maliki might capture when results are announced in coming days.
