Rory McCarthy

Added to this is their avowed religious conviction. “I came for the defense of Islam,” Ali said. He and the other 20 or so fighters in his platoon describe themselves as an “Islamic resistance.”

Ali and his colleagues spent most of yesterday taking cover in the shade. From a window in a building above them a sniper fired out a round every few minutes into the Valley of Peace cemetery, just 100 meters away.

On the far side of the vast cemetery are 2,000 U.S. Marines, who have threatened to seize control of the city. Last night their commander said his troops were making the “final preparations” for an attack, though an early onslaught was delayed at the last minute, according to the New York Times. One of Sadr’s associates warned that vital oil pipelines in southern Iraq would be blown up if the U.S. attacked Najaf.

Occasionally a U.S. attack helicopter passed nearby, and the fighters fired off rounds from their machine guns and Kalashnikovs inexpertly. There were several command wires leading out to bombs hidden in the cemetery, ready to ambush American forces when they advanced.

The entire scene was imbued with deep religious overtones and constant references to the Imam Ali, the prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law and a key figure in the Shiite sect. “Ali is with you,” they said to each other in greetings.

“Do you think I aim when I shoot this thing?” one machine gunner said to another fighter. “All these things are done by Imam Ali. All I have to do is carry the thing and pull the trigger and he will help me with my aim and bring down the helicopter. It is not me that does these things.”

The other Shiite parties hold little appeal for the fighters. “They just use Islamic slogans to cover up what they are doing,” said Ali. “Syed Muqtada is a nationalist and he demands the rights of the Iraqi people and the rights of the poor. He is the only one who didn’t betray the people and cooperate with the Americans.”

The fighters here in Najaf have rallied behind Sadr, the scion of a highly respected clerical family, because unlike all other leading Shiite political leaders he has so far shunned involvement in the pro-American governments. Although his radicalism is rejected by many middle-class Shiites, he carries a broad appeal for those looking for a revolutionary streak in the Shiite faith in Iraq. It was his father’s cousin, Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr, who began the activist, or “spoken,” school in Najaf’s Shiite clerical community, advocating an Islamic state through revolution until he was killed in 1979.

Muqtada’s father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr also acquired a reputation as a social activist until he was assassinated in 1999. Since last year’s invasion, his son has sought to claim that activist’s mantle too.

It is an appeal that, for months after last year’s invasion, the U.S. and British occupation authorities seriously underestimated. Now Sadr is leading his second uprising in just five months.

For the past week Najaf, site of the holiest shrine in the Shiite faith, has been the focus of fighting, but there have also been clashes in Baghdad and in southern towns that have challenged the new government.

In an acknowledgment of the sensitivity of the conflict, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, one of Iraq’s two vice presidents and leader of the biggest Shiite party, the Daawa, yesterday said U.S. troops should stop fighting in Najaf and leave the job to Iraqi security forces.

The militia will be waiting — galvanized by the words of Sadr, who has urged the fighters to continue even if he is killed or captured.

Every few hours yesterday a cleric in the gold-domed Imam Ali shrine, in the heart of the old city, issued exhortations, and just after 1 p.m. the fighters pulled out sheets of cardboard, took off their ammunition belts and headscarves and knelt to pray. Then they sat in the shade, eating grapes stored over ice in a cooler.

Vote totals were being checked, then added up by computer, after first tallies were completed by hand at polling stations nationwide. Busloads of ballots were shipped under guard to Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone.

Hakim, who has spent most of the past 20 years living in exile in Iran, said his party would reach out to other groups when the parliament began writing a new constitution for the country.

Other parties representing Kurds and secular Shiites are expected to do well, but a much lower turnout among the Sunni minority means they could be underrepresented. “We don’t want anyone to be marginalized. We want everyone to take part in writing the constitution,” Hakim told Reuters. “We will defend the rights of all minorities and all groups no matter how small they are.” He said his coalition would talk to U.S. commanders about a timetable for withdrawing troops. Most politicians, however, accept that there is not going to be an immediate departure of the 140,000 American troops still in Iraq.

Iraq’s U.S.-appointed interim president, Ghazi al-Yawar, said Tuesday that some U.S. troops could leave the country by the end of the year but that it would be wrong to demand their immediate withdrawal. “It’s only complete nonsense to ask the troops to leave in this chaos and this vacuum of power,” he said. “But by the end of this year there could begin to be a reduction in foreign forces if there is an improvement in the capability of the Iraqi security forces.” Yawar is one of the few Sunni Arabs likely to be elected to the new parliament.

Hazem Sha’alan, the interim defense minister and a senior member of Yawar’s party, said it would take time for Iraqi forces to become strong enough to work alone.

In recent days Iraqi armored vehicles and aging tanks have appeared in Baghdad, and the number of police and Iraqi national guard members in the city appears to have increased significantly.

Although insurgents failed to disrupt the election, there is little sense that the guerrilla war that has shaped the past 22 months is on the wane. “We don’t want to have foreign troops in our country,” Sha’alan said. “But at the same time we believe these forces should stay for some time, until we are able to control the borders and establish a new modern army, and we have efficient intelligence. At that time … we’ll ask them to leave.”

Most of the big political parties included a demand for a timetable for the withdrawal of the U.S. military in their election manifestos. But in a CNN interview Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld hinted that there was no timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops: “It’s not a month or a year. It’s condition based,” he said, in his first comments since the election.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, with the election completed and the ballots safely in Baghdad, Iraqi authorities eased the severe security measures that had been put in place to protect voters and polling centers. The hours of the nighttime curfew have been reduced, and now extend from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m.

Royal Jordanian Airlines and Iraqi Airways have resumed flights to and from Baghdad. And vehicles can now cross the border between Iraq and Syria at Tanaf. On Tuesday, a five-mile line of buses loaded with goods was waiting on the Syrian side to cross at Yarubiya, which leads to the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, but that crossing point remained closed.

Those days of mass protest are over. Today there are barely a dozen women present. Half are veiled and most have come with male relatives or colleagues for protection. It is a quiet indictment of the occupation and underscores the astonishing collapse in security, particularly for women, that it has brought. “Do you feel how threatening it is to go out in the streets? Can you guarantee that you are safe and alive by the end of the day?” asks Yanar Mohammad, the conference organizer and one of the most ardent women’s rights activists in Iraq. “It is the insecurity that handicaps the organizing of women.”

The few women there describe how things have changed for them since the fall of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent rise in Islamic parties. Many more cover their hair now, sometimes in belief, often through peer-group pressure or simply to protect themselves in anonymity. “Veils are imposed on young girls,” says Nadam Moaeed. “What do girls understand from this veil? It will have a bad psychological effect. She will become a negative presence in society.”

She describes the new pressures on children in schools and the pervasive influence of the religious parties, particularly the conservative Shiite groups, which are certain to dominate the new parliament after this weekend’s elections. “Political parties come and take a room in the school building, and they impose on every female student veils and even gloves,” she says. “Where is the humanity in that? They are always putting up Islamic pictures in the school, and the children don’t understand it at all. We heard of one school where Christian girls were made to wear the veil.”

Thiqra Faisal, a student, has traveled up from Basra, a city regarded as more liberal than most. “Even in the universities, women can’t wear what they want,” she says. “If you see a woman without a scarf in the street, everyone will be surprised. You have to be fully covered.”

It was not always this way. In the 1950s, Iraq was the first Arab country to appoint a female government minister. Women worked freely in banks and government and administrative departments and were involved in a vibrant public debate. The changes came in the 1990s, when Saddam began to appease the tribes and the imams. He allowed men to take four wives and ruled there would no longer be any punishment for a man who killed a woman in his family if he suspected her of an “honor crime”

These conservative rulings have been inherited and tacitly endorsed by the major religious parties. At one stage a year ago, hard-liners in the U.S.-appointed governing council tried to pass Article 137, which would impose Islamic Sharia law over rights of personal status, drastically diluting the legal protection for women. After a series of vocal protests the article was dropped, but it was a clear warning of the conservative political program that lies ahead. These are the public problems. In private there is so much more that remains unspoken.

The conference organizer, Yanar Mohammed, 44, runs the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, an outspoken campaign movement. She is rare among Iraqi women: avowedly secular and unafraid to stand up in public and pugnaciously condemn the failings of the male-dominated establishment. She dresses as she might in the West — today she is wearing a smart trouser suit, and her long dark hair is, as always, uncovered. Her views are so radical in today’s Iraq that she has twice had death threats, always travels with a guard and has a small silver pistol hidden in her purse.

Her group has already established two women’s shelters — in Baghdad and Kirkuk. In the past year perhaps a dozen women have been taken in, and many more have asked for help, telling stories of brutality and oppression rarely acknowledged in public. They found one woman from a strict Islamic family in the Kurdish north who had been raped before she was married. “After her husband found out, he decided she was filthy and not allowed to touch her newborn child. It was bad, daily beatings. We found her on the street weeping,” says Mohammed. Now the woman, 23, is back at school, living in the shelter and planning to go to university.

The group’s campaigning and shelters are largely down to the energy of Mohammed herself. An architecture graduate from Baghdad University, she lived abroad for 10 years before the war, mostly in Toronto. There she met socialist feminists and decided to return to Iraq to campaign after the fall of the regime. She sold her house and left her husband and 17-year-old son behind in Canada.

“I became obsessed with the shelter. It had to be done,” she says. Now, a year on, she is worried that many people’s frustration at the failures of the occupation are being channeled into hard-line Islamic movements. “The liberation should happen through a civil and secular alternative.”

She makes her case in an unrepentant way. The latest copy of her group’s newspaper, al-Musawat, or Equality, shows a photo of her burning a veil. “They should be afraid of us,” she writes. She refuses to take part in the elections this Sunday, even though rules are in place to ensure that each party includes 25 percent women among its candidates. She argues that the overwhelming influence of the Islamists has unfairly tipped the balance and says her group would be unlikely to win a seat. Instead she will continue campaigning from outside government.

“There are thousands of secular people supporting me. With short, certain steps we will get somewhere,” she says. “But it will take time.”

Mr Valenzuela described the vote as a “daunting challenge”. He said: “Security in a transitional election is never good, never ideal. But it doesn’t disqualify elections from taking place.”

He admitted he was concerned about fresh outbreaks of violence in troubled Sunni Muslim towns such as Samarra and Baquba, both north of the capital, and in western Baghdad.

Changes have already been introduced to the voting rules to encourage Sunnis from other violent towns, such as Falluja and Ramadi in the west, and Mosul in the north, to vote.

Unlike other Iraqis, they will be able to register and vote on the same day. Voters from Falluja and Ramadi will be able to cast their ballot anywhere in their province. Refugees who fled Falluja before the U.S. military assault on the city in November can vote in polling stations set up in refugee camps and in western Baghdad.

Six of the eight Iraqi election commissioners working in Mosul had been forced to resign late last year after a campaign of threats and intimidation, Mr Valenzuela said. But replacements had now been recruited. The U.S. assault on Falluja meant election officials in the nearby province were unable to work. Others had “gone underground,” he said.

The mechanics of the vote present the biggest logistics challenge since the war. About 12.5 million Iraqis are registered to vote and 5,000 polling centers, mostly in government schools, will be established for the day of the election, January 30.

Iraq’s election commission will face huge security difficulties not only in protecting voters as they enter polling centers but also in protecting the vote tallies as they are taken back to Baghdad.

Voters will be marked with indelible ink, to prevent multiple voting, but that could put them at risk of retribution. In previous difficult elections, such as those in Cambodia in 1993 and South Africa in 1994, invisible ink was used. But in Iraq voters will be marked with visible ink. “The Iraqis felt it was incredibly important that people realized there was not going to be multiple voting,” Mr Valenzuela said.

Voters’ names will be crossed off a list once they have cast their ballot and those lists could also be used in future for recriminations by insurgents who are bitterly opposed to the vote.

A total of 7,785 candidates are standing for election to the 275-seat national assembly. But, because of the heightened security fears, few of those candidates have been named. In the final days before the vote, the election commission will publish the full candidate list in the Iraqi press.

On the day, voters will be presented with a large ballot paper, with the names of 111 parties and coalitions. Each has its own number and most have their own symbol, ranging from date palms to maps of Iraq, medals, a candle and a lion’s head. Given the vast scale of the operation and the tough security restrictions it is likely to be up to 10 days before the result is known.

Leading Shia figures yesterday played down concerns that the election could disenfranchise the Sunni constituency and give it little alternative but to wage all-out civil war.

A statement issued by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a movement which is part of the Shia house coalition expected to dominate the election, said: “Not winning in the elections does not mean absence from the stage of activity and impact.”

Another Shia leader, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, head of the Dawa party, which sits in the same coalition, said: “The background of those who are victimizing Shi’ites might be Sunni, but there is wide understanding that they do not represent Sunni thinking.

“Neither Sunnis nor Shi’ites are prepared to accept civil war,” he told Reuters.

Twice last year he orchestrated big uprisings across southern Iraq against the U.S. and British military. But now he has turned to politics. His followers, the more violent end of Iraq’s Shiite spectrum, are intent on voting in the Jan. 30 poll. They know that for the first time in centuries they will see a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.

Sadr is taking a cautious approach: He is not running for election nor has he proposed a boycott. Several of his aides are running in at least two separate political coalitions. The election officials at the school, which will be a polling center, say tens of thousands of people in Sadr City rushed to check and correct their voter registration forms before the deadline last month.

In other areas of the city, particularly violent Sunni districts where opposition to the occupation is strong, few voters made the effort. “It is a matter of freedom,” the election official said. “If people want to vote it is up to them. This is democracy.”

But the religious parties here are making a concerted effort. On the classroom’s blackboard there are slogans, one reading: “Your voice is the future.” Another says: “Yes, yes to Islam. Yes, yes to the Hawza, referring to Shiite clerical authorities in Najjaf. And representatives made house visits to check that all voters had registered.

The young official said he had twice received death threats on his mobile warning him to stop working. “The caller told me I would be killed. I told him, ‘I feel bad for you. If you come here maybe I will kill you first.’ He called again and told me to behave myself. He said, ‘Your religion and your nation are the most important things.’”

In other parts of Iraq election staff have been murdered. In the restive province of Anbar, which includes the Sunni towns of Fallujah and Ramadi, staff resigned en masse. Dozens more in west Baghdad walked out. That mirrors the overall pattern expected on Election Day: Large numbers of voters are expected in the Shiite areas across the south and very few from the Sunni areas in Baghdad and central Iraq, where the insurgency has been strongest. It means Sadr City is one of the few places in Iraq where candidates can openly campaign in the streets.

At Friday prayers last week in Sadr City the imam at al-Mohsin Mosque read a speech from Sadr. “Your silence is as if you are accepting the occupation. Ask for your rights.” Several of the thousands of worshipers held posters of Sadr. One held the Iraqi flag, on which had been added the words: “Long live al-Sadr. Muqtada is our bridge to paradise.”

Some of Sadr’s followers are represented in the main Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, which is led by former exiles and is likely to win the largest share of the vote. Others, led by the editor of a pro-Sadr newspaper, Fattah Sheikh, have formed their own party, the Independent Nationalist Elites and Cadres. As the Friday sermon was read, Sheikh, 38, in a smart brown suit and brogues, listened intently. When they cheered he took photos on his mobile.

“We Iraqis are going to get our rights in the election,” he said later. We are going to give a voice to all these people. For more than 30 years we have been suffering and oppressed.”