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.”

Balwa reflects the sharp divisions in Iraq in the run-up to an election for which 12.5 million people are registered to vote. He reflects on an Iraq divided between those who will vote and those, either through fear or rejection of the process, will stay at home.

He reflects, too, on an Iraq divided between the minority Sunni Muslims, who dominated the Iraq of Saddam Hussein for decades, and southern Shiites and northern Kurds. The latter comprise the 80 percent of the population who were persecuted under Saddam’s rule, while the Sunni minority of just 20 percent dominated all areas of Iraqi life, the ruling Baath Party in particular.

It is the lethal tension between these two groups that will define whether the next 12 months of the political process, which the elections will kick-start, will mark the beginning of the end of Iraq’s violence or the start of the country’s breakup and descent into civil war. The elections will not just be critical for Iraqis. For countries such as Britain and the U.S., whose increasingly war-weary populations are supplying the bulk of foreign troops in Iraq, the elections threaten to have a lasting impact, dictating when those soldiers can finally come home.

Evidence on which path Iraq might follow has for months been pored over by politicians, diplomats, academics and intelligence officials. If one thing is certain, it is that this month’s elections will mark the moment of ascendancy of the majority Shiites, who make up 60 percent or more of the country’s population — and of Sunni defeat. What is also certain is that the weeks leading up to the announcement of the results in mid-February will be bloody.

These are twin issues that are highlighted by Mike Rubin, a former political advisor to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq: I expect there to be a great deal of violence, especially in the two or three days before the election itself.

He describes the conundrum at the heart of the Sunni abstention and Sunni violence. The Sunni leaders, he explains, are not afraid that the election will not represent them. They are afraid that it will represent them. They are afraid of coming to terms with their minority status. While their minority status will be confirmed whether Sunnis vote or not, all they can hope is that by abstaining in large numbers, and blaming the violent disruption caused by their own community for being unable to participate, somehow they can rob the poll of its legitimacy.

What is clear is that despite the spiraling violence aimed at disrupting the elections, vast numbers of Iraqis will vote on Jan. 30. Polls conducted over the past few months in Iraq — while uncertain in other respects — have indicated that 80 percent of the electorate intends to vote, a figure that would suggest turnouts for Shiites and Kurds in the ninth percentile and a Sunni vote likely to be desperately low. Given the campaign of abstention and intimidation in the Sunni heartland, that makes the likely results not difficult to fathom: a massive victory for lists dominated by Shiites way beyond the 60 percent that they represent in the population. That high turnout is being encouraged by a religious decree issued by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani calling on all Shiites to vote.

But for some the likely scale of a victory for Shiite candidates as a result of a Sunni boycott is as much a cause for concern as the boycott itself. Among those afraid of the impact of a widespread Sunni abstention is Iraq’s interior minister, Falah al-Naqib.

Boycotting means betrayal and the sparking of civil war, he said last week. If the National Assembly does not represent all Iraqis, we will enter civil war. It is precisely this that has driven one of Iraq’s most influential Shiite parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), to appeal last week to reluctant Sunnis to vote. Most Sunnis, however, seem unlikely to listen, a situation that has deteriorated markedly from even two months ago, when the main Sunni political party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, entered a list of 275 candidates.

After failing to win agreement for a six-month delay of the vote because of the violence, the party eventually withdrew. While it remains on the ballot, its candidates have promised not to take up their seats. With a self-justifying logic, Ayad al-Samarrai, a senior official in the party, said he believed a delay would at least have helped reduce the violence. If there are 80 percent of our supporters who can’t vote now, that would be down to 20 percent who couldn’t vote, he said, ignoring the fact that it is precisely the fact of Sunni militants seeking to disrupt the elections that is behind the low Sunni participation. It is a reality not likely to be transformed by a six-month delay.

But whether the election’s backers in London and Washington like it or not — and no matter how hard they try to persuade the world to focus on the political process and not the violence — it is precisely the fear of civil war and division that hangs over not just the poll but its aftermath as well. A single question dominates: whether the insurgency will continue to grow in parallel to the rolling out of the political process that will lead to a referendum on a new constitution planned for October, or whether these elections will be the high-water mark of the violence. It is the latter that Washington and London are counting on.

And the social complexity of the insurgency has led some to abandon attempts to put a numerical value on the scale of the resistance, which at least one Iraqi minister has claimed recently to be 200,000 strong, to evaluate whether even now it is still growing, and to conceive of it in terms of its potential to influence instead.

It is very difficult to define what membership of the insurgency entails, says one Whitehall source. If you let your cousin hide in your house because he is an insurgent, does that mean you are an insurgent too? The crucial question is whether its influence is continuing to expand. At the moment the insurgency still lacks any coherent political agenda. We still see it as operating largely in local networks, and it has yet to show any signs of achieving any consensus across the sectarian divide.

This inability to join forces with Shiites in a joint resistance, says the official, exists despite the fact that all parties, Shiites included, say they want foreign troops to leave. But if officials hope that this may mark the limit of the uprising, what is also evident is that despite the siege of Fallujah and continuing operations across the Sunni triangle and elsewhere, the resistance — in physical terms at least — still appears not to have lost its momentum.

While it is inevitable that the violence will accelerate in the days ahead, the insurgents, foreign governments and Iraqis themselves recognize that it is the political settlement reached after the elections that is crucial to whether Iraq can avoid a wider bloodshed.

A Shiite-dominated National Assembly of 275 members will be asked to select a president and two vice presidents, who will then choose a prime minister and nominate a cabinet. That cabinet will be referred back to the assembly for approval. Already some are predicting that the allocation of ministerial portfolios may be a source of its own tension as individuals and parties struggle for powerful ministries.

Former U.S. political advisor Rubin is one of those who see the potential for tension over who controls the powerful Interior Ministry and, beyond that, a clash of authority with American military authorities. It is a fight, Rubin believes, that the Shiites will win, with the Kurds getting the presidency and the Sunnis, perhaps, the Foreign Ministry.

Even more critical, however, will be the struggle to write Iraq’s new Constitution, scheduled to be put to a referendum in October, a referendum that can be blocked if it is rejected by three provinces, a point in Iraq’s interim law already deeply unpopular with Shiites, who fear that Kurds and Sunnis could use it to block articles that enjoy majority support, in particular over the sensitive area of the role of religion in the state.

It is precisely for these reasons that both U.S. and U.K. officials are convinced that even if there is a widespread Sunni boycott, some mechanism must be incorporated by a Shiite-dominated Iraqi assembly and government to ensure proper Sunni representation of some kind.

Among those who have articulated this in recent days is been John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, who said last week that it was important for Iraq’s new political leaders to be as inclusive as possible in government even if the Sunnis underperform in the vote. It is a call that was reiterated on Friday by the present justice minister, Malek Dohan al-Hasan, a Shiite who warned his co-religionists to protect minority rights, especially those of Sunnis staying away from the polls.

He touched on an already controversial issue that many fear will be exacerbated if a Shiite landslide is returned in the absence of Sunni voters: that Shiite parties must refrain from staffing the government only with their followers, a trend already apparent in the interim government.

Elections are now certain, Hasan, who heads a secular list contesting the election, told Reuters. But I ask the Shiites to look around them. You are in an Arab Sunni region. Who will come to your aid if you monopolize power? Look at the example of Saddam and what happens when political power is not used for the common good.

The Sunni groups — and I truly despise using this term because Iraq is truly a mixed nation — have not been frank either. Their argument about the illegitimacy of elections under occupation does not hold. Look at Japan and Germany after the Second World War, he added.

This issue is also bothering some Western officials, who admit that no matter how successful Election Day turns out to be in the numbers voting, a great deal is being asked of Iraqis about how they exercise their sovereignty. The parallel is with the Russian economy, said one British official. Everyone had high hopes when they had got rid of Soviet statism, but did not expect the chaotic and erratic results. We are asking an awful lot of the Iraqi people, who have no experience of a fully participatory democratic system, and who do not enjoy even the minimum levels of political trust.

We would have been OK if the Iraqi middle class had still been intact, but it had a huge hole blown in it in the past 14 years between the first and second Gulf wars. The people who might have been the motor of change were disempowered. Politically, Iraq is a damaged child. Its problems are long term.

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.”

In interviews, insurgents challenge official U.S. accounts of a decisive victory and claim many of the rebels left the city in a preplanned withdrawal. “It is completely devastated,” Fadhil writes in the Guardian Tuesday. “Fallujah used to be a modern city; now there is nothing. We spend that first day going through the rubble that had been the center of the city; I don’t see a single building that is functioning.”

Most of Fallujah’s 300,000 residents fled before the assault, and now some have begun to return to find their homes destroyed, the water and electricity still cut and untreated sewage flowing openly. There is little chance elections can be held there with election day three weeks away.

Some Iraqis openly criticize the fighters, despite the risks. “The mujahedin are responsible and the clerics for the destruction that happened to our city; no one will forgive them for that,” a former major in the much-feared Republican Guard tells Fadhil.

In one badly damaged home near a cemetery, he finds the body of a fighter still lying on the floor. “The leg is missing, the hand is missing and the furniture in the house has been destroyed,” he writes. “I can’t breathe with the smell.” U.S. commanders claimed to have killed more than 1,200 insurgents in the November battle, dealing a serious blow to the insurgency. Before the assault, Fallujah was a no-go area for the U.S. and Iraqi military. But in a graveyard known as the “martyrs cemetery,” Fadhil counts only 76 graves. In houses he finds other bodies he suspects were civilians.

“I saw other rotting bodies that showed no sign of being fighters. In one house in the market there were four bodies inside the guestroom,” he writes. “In this house there were no bullets in the walls, just four dead men lying curled up beside each other, with bullet holes in the mosquito nets that covered the windows.”

The allegations were put to U.S. forces in Baghdad five days ago. There has been no reply.

Despite the intense fight in Fallujah, the insurgency has gathered pace across Iraq, particularly in the northern city of Mosul, once a model of peace and calm, and in Baghdad, where the deputy police chief was assassinated Monday. U.S. commanders thought the rebels had been surrounded in Fallujah. Yet one fighter tells Fadhil his men left 10 days into the battle: “We did not pull out because we did not want to fight. We needed to regroup; it was a tactical move.”