An Iraqi man inspects the aftermath of a car bomb attack at a used cars dealers parking lot in Habibiya neighborhood of eastern Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday. Less than a week before Iraqis in much of the country are scheduled to vote in the country’s first elections since the 2011 US troop withdrawal, a series of attacks across Iraq Monday, many involving car bombs, has killed and wounded dozens of people, police said. — AP

Tim Arango



BAGHDAD — In the first Iraqi elections since the American troop withdrawal, Sunni candidates are being attacked and killed in greater numbers than in recent campaigns, raising concerns in Washington over Iraq’s political stability and the viability of a democratic system the United States has heavily invested in over years of war and diplomacy.



At least 15 candidates, all members of the minority Sunni community, have been assassinated — some apparently by political opponents. Many others have been wounded or kidnapped or have received menacing text messages or phone calls demanding that they withdraw.



As candidates nervously continue meeting voters, promising jobs and handing out cellphone cards in exchange for assurances of their votes in local elections this weekend, there are worries that the violence is deterring good candidates — and that voters will be put off as well.



In the latest surge of violence, more than 20 attacks around the country Monday killed close to 50 people and wounded nearly 200. Two schools in Hilla that were to serve as polling sites were blown up by homemade bombs; no one was killed, but the explosions suggested that insurgents might be intent on attacking voters and not just candidates. Security officials in Hilla quickly declared a state of emergency, and said they had intelligence that militants were preparing to target more polling stations in the region.



At the same time, the violence could further mar the credibility of an election that was already being closely watched for fraud or other abuses: for the first time since the American invasion in 2003, Iraqi officials will be largely on their own in securing and monitoring elections. “Killing candidates means instilling fear,” said Hameed Fadhil, a political-science professor at Baghdad University. “And that is why I think it will affect voter participation, because I don’t think that people will want to risk their lives again.”



Politics and violence have long been intertwined in Iraq, where the promise of democracy is always tempered by sectarian, tribal and ideological conflict. But this election cycle is proving deadlier than either of the last two times that Iraqis went to the polls — in 2010 for parliamentary elections and in 2009 for provincial elections, said Ghati Al-Zawbai, an official at the Independent High Electoral Commission, which oversees elections in Iraq.



On a recent morning, the rituals of mourning played out over sweet tea and heaps of rice and lamb in the Baghdad home of Salah Al-Obeidi, a prominent lawyer who days earlier was shot to death in his office just up the road. Obeidi, 48, was a Sunni candidate and a legal adviser to Ayad Allawi, the secular Shiite who heads Iraqiya, the mostly Sunni bloc that won the most seats in the 2010 parliamentary elections.



“Because he’s a Sunni, no one will care,” said Hussam Jassim, a friend of Obeidi’s. The murder will probably never be solved, he said, adding that he believed the gunmen were aligned with the Shiite-dominated government.

Obeidi almost always carried a pistol, but he had left it at home on the day he was killed. And days earlier, he received a text message that read, “Withdraw from the election or you will be killed,” said his son, Abdella Sabbah. Sabbah said that he had hoped his father would heed the warning and told him: “I don’t think you need to run for this election. It is too dangerous.” – The New York Times