Nouri Maliki

The president of Iraq's Kurdish region charged Saturday that Prime Minister Nouri Maliki was drifting toward authoritarian rule, in the latest sign of the dangerous rift that has emerged between the Iraqi leader and his partners in the country's ruling coalition. "One gets lost in absolute authority," said Massoud Barzani, the leader of the semi- autonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq's north. "You become too authoritarian, you lose yourself."

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.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki traveled to Anbar province, a visit that three years ago would have been considered a suicide mission into the cradle of the Sunni Arab resistance. Now the Shiite Muslim leader, famously mistrustful of the sect that dominated Iraq during Saddam Hussein's reign, was huddling with the head of the ruling Sunni coalition in Anbar, talking of the need to cut across sectarian lines in upcoming national elections.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki unveiled today his coalition of religious, secular and tribal parties that will run in national elections this winter. With his announcement, the prime minister put himself in competition with fellow Shiite Muslims of his onetime political ally, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. The split between Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party and the SIIC was unthinkable four years ago when the country's Shiite religious majority stood united in a bid to solidify its control of Iraq after years of suffering under the Sunni-dominated regime of the late dictator Saddam Hussein.