Absent election results, Iraq parties stake claims

BAGHDAD — The two rival groups gathered for separate victory parties in the streets of Ramadi in Anbar province, once the stamping ground of the Al Qaeda in Iraq militant group. The tribal party fired off celebratory rounds from their Kalashnikov rifles and their opponents in the Iraqi Islamic Party offered a booming retort, like rowdy fans at a hockey match ready for a brawl.

The Iraqi police quickly slapped a curfew on the city Monday night, lifted only at dawn the next day. Their action helped defuse a possible full-on melee before the country's electoral commission had even finished a preliminary ballot count from Saturday's vote.

In the absence of results in Iraq, rumors swirl and parties, full of bluster and occasional bile, make competing claims of triumph as they grasp for victory in a land where politics can be a blood sport.

Faraj Haidari, head of the High Independent Electoral Commission, said on the U.S.-funded Al Hurra satellite news channel Tuesday that he did not expect a preliminary tally before Thursday afternoon at the earliest; some officials have said it could even be Friday. That hasn't stopped political leaders from declaring victory.

Anbar province's senior political leaders sounded a bit like action movie parodies as rumors spread that the Iraqi Islamic Party had won 43% of the provincial council seats.

The head of one of the most popular Sunni Arab tribal factions, Sheik Ahmed Buzaigh abu Risha, threatened to turn his guns on the electoral commission. "If the percentage is true, then we will transfer our entity from a political to a military one, to fight the Islamic Party and the commission," he warned.

A tribal rival to Abu Risha, Sheik Hameed Farhan Hays, weighed in with his own dose of machismo: "We have warned the electoral commission . . . if the provincial seats are given to the Islamic Party like before, then we will fight them and kick them out of Anbar."

If other political battles around the country aren't infused with quite the same high levels of testosterone, many Iraqi parties are rushing out victory claims with gusto worthy of Republicans and Democrats in 2000 battling it out over hanging chads in Florida. The front-running Shiite Muslim religious factions -- Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, or SIIC -- have both insisted that they cleaned up from central to southern Iraq.