The Latest from Iran (27 March): Rumours

2330 GMT: A Quick Note. We've taken the evening off to spend time with friends and unwind. We'll be back bright and early on Sunday.

Meanwhile, here's a new analysis for you: "Israel, Iran, and 'Existential Threat'".

1800 GMT: Public Funeral for Montazeri's Wife Blocked? Iranian officials have objected to a funeral procession for the wife of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, who passed away today (see 1125 GMT), from the family house to the shrine of Masoumeh (the sister of Imam Reza, the eighth Imam of Shia) in Qom.

Ahmad Montazeri, the son of the Ayatollah, told BBC Persian that the officials limited the funeral ceremony to 150 metres from the burial site . The family objected, so the compromise is that the public can gather in the Masoumeh shrine where Grand Ayatollah Shobeyri-Zanjani will say the prayer.

The Latest from Iran (26 March): Break Time

1730 GMT: Temporarily Freed, Politically Active. Mostafa Tajzadeh, senior member of the Islamic Iran Participation Front and former Deputy Minister of Interior, continues to use his temporary release from prison to visit families of detainees and others who have been bailed but face long prison sentences. The last meeting is with key reformist thinker Saeed Hajarian, who was jailed for more than three months and put on trial after the June election.


1515 GMT: Academics and Political Prisoners. Students have sent an open letter to the head of Iran's judiciary, Sadegh Larijani, to protest the arrest of Abdollah Yousefzadegan, a law student at Allameh Tabatabai University and winner of the nationwide Olympiad of Literature. Yousefzadegan was detained on 15 March in Mashhad and has not yet been charged.

The letter condemns the harsh treatment of the academic elite and maintains that the arrest of Yousefzadegan “destroys the credibility of the judiciary and trust in the security institutions of the Islamic Republic".

1310 GMT: Rumour Denied. Mir Hossein Mousavi's website Kalemeh is denying the report, first circulated by Farda News, that Mousavi met Hashemi Rafsanjani on the first day of Nowruz.

1125 GMT: Rah-e-Sabz reports that the wife of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri passed away in Qom this morning. Her funeral will take place tomorrow 10:00 am local time.

Montazeri, the one-time successor to Ayatollah Khomeini, died in December.

1100 GMT: Nowruz Visits. Mir Hossein Mousavi and Zahra Rahnavard saw the family of Amir Aboutalebi, a Mousavi advisor who has been detained since January. Despite the efforts of Aboutalebi's family, he was not granted temporary release for Iranian New Year. Aboutalebi recently had his first phone call with his family after 45 days of detention.

A group of pro-Green Movement students of Elm-o-Sana’at University, where Aboutalebi's children study, also sent their sympathy to the family. Aboutalebi was a political prisoner of the Shah, losing an eye during his detention and was also pursued by the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MKO) after the Revolution.

0950 GMT: Reformist Challenge. Rasoul Montakhab-nia, the deputy head of the Etemade Melli party, has declared that the Government "cannot speak with language of force to people." Montakhab-nia say that this new year should be a year of forgiveness(for protesters, and that responsible political figures should try to involve all Iranians in the "nezam" (system) and Revolution of the Islamic Republic.

0940 GMT: Subsidy Fightback. The President's supporters are hitting back at Parliament's criticism of his economic manoeuvres (see 0755 GMT). Former Minister of Health Alireza Marandi says that the duty of the Majlis is to support the Government, while Lotfollah Forouzandeh asks the Parliament to take the burden off the Government's shoulders and accept the subsidy cuts and spending proposals.

0935 GMT: Friday Prayer Round-Up. Rah-e-Sabz has the highlights of prayer addresses throughout the country. An EA correspondent gives the top prize to Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi in Tehran with "the keys  God offered to the Supreme Leader" to solve Iran's problems.  Runner-up is  Ali Hajizadeh from Tabriz, who has discovered a "Velvet Revolution" in Iraq.

0925 GMT: Rumour of Day (2). The Iranian blog Che Mishavad (What Happens) blog claims that the Revolutionary Guard is laundering money, including revenues from drug smuggling, in Bahrain and Kuwait. The money is then placed through Ali Jannati, the son of Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the head of the Guardian Council, into a Swiss bank.

0915 GMT: Rumour of Day.  Rah-e-Sabz claims that the Supreme Leader promised Hashemi Rafsanjani that most political prisoners would be freed. However, when the head of Iran's judiciary, Sadegh Larijani, tried to do so, the move was blocked by the "hard-line" Judge Abolqasem Salavati.

0755 GMT: The Subsidy Battle. Khabar Online keeps up the pressure on the President, featuring the claim of member of Parliament Hasan Qafouri Fard that Ahmadinejad is not authorised to call for a national referendum on his subsidy reduction and spending plans.

The Parliament approved an extra $20 billion in the Iranian budget from the subsidy cuts but has refused Ahmadinejad's $40 billion request.

0740 GMT: The relative quiet in Iran continues, as global attention focuses on the elections next door in Iraq. Press TV's top domestic headline is "Iran wins 3rd Sitting Volleyball World Championships".

There is a bit of a show for the first International Nowruz Celebrations in Tehran and Shiraz, as President Ahmadinejad tries to boost the image of international legitimacy. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, Tajikistan's President Emomali Rahmon, and Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov are in Tehran for the two-day event, and Iranian state media reports that they will be joined by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek.

A useful story from the Carnegie Council, which gets behind all the sanctions huffing-and-puffing to identify the key development, "U.S. Pressures Oil Companies to Leave Iran". This passage deserves attention and repetition:

Since the start of 2010, oil giant Royal Dutch Shell stated it would no longer sell gasoline to Iran, along with Glencore (Switzerland), Vitol (Switzerland), and Trafigura (Amsterdam). British Petroleum and Reliance (India) stopped selling to Iran in 2009. With this series of departures, Iran now imports its oil from only five sources: Total (France), Lukoil (Russia), Petronas (Malaysia), Independent Oil Group (Kuwait), and Chinese companies. [Lukoil declared just this week that it, too, would divest.]

The Day After the Iraq Election: "Politics Takes Over"

1220 GMT: The excellent analyst Marc Lynch has just made the immediate point, "All the Iraqi lists appear to be claiming victory. I'd wait for official results, which will be a while." His comment comes a few hours after a CNN correspondent pondered, "Each TV station corresponding to each political bloc saying that they are the winners...hmmm...."

The “Violent Semi-Peace”: Elections in Iraq, Escalation in Afghanistan
Iraq LiveBlog: Election Day

This is the real politics of Iraq, a day after the headlines of bombings and "democracy". With no party in the position to establish a national majority and indeed, outside Kurdistan, even a regional dominance, the negotiations, coercions, and manipulations take over, even before the preliminary results are announced on Thursday.

In Kurdistan, there is an intriguing contest between the Kurdistan List --- made up of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by Kurdish Prime Minister Masoud Barzani and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan led by Iraq President Jalal Talabani --- and the Gorran Party, established to break the stranglehold of the KDP and PUK on Kurdish politics. An activist says that Gorran narrowly won in the city of Suleymaniyah and lost in province of the same name; however, Gorran is claiming fraud in the provincial vote. Another activist says that Gorran has also secured seats in Diyala, Mosul, and Salahaddin; however, the Kurdistan List has triumphed by a 2:1 margin in Erbil.


Juan Cole offers an overview:

Sunday's vote for a new parliament in Iraq on Sunday could result in two possible geopolitical futures for that country.

If the Iraqi National List of former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi did well enough to come to power, that would reorient Iraq radically, taking it back in some ways to 2002. Allawi's coalition is largely made up of Arab nationalists who would see Iran as a threat and would ally with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. Baghdad would go back to helping contain Iran. Sunni Arab radicalism would likely be tamped down. For Washington, it would be the best of all possible worlds-- a pro-American Iraqi government headed by a former CIA asset that is willing to help pressure Iran for the West. Internally, an Allawi government that depends heavily on Sunni Arab constituencies would find it difficult to compromise with the Kurds on the disputed province of Kirkuk or on Kurdistan's interests in Ninevah and Diyala, setting the stage for a potential civil war.

If, on the other hand, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki manages to hold on to power, Iraq will remain firmly in Shiite hands, and will likely have warm relations with Tehran. Certainly, Baghdad would have no interest in helping contain Iran. Relations with Saudi Arabia will continue to be bad. As the US withdraws, Iranian influence could ramp up and fill the vacuum. Al-Maliki also has his tensions with the Kurds, but his relatively bad relations with the Sunni Arabs of Mosul mean that he could deal with the Kurds without incurring much more enmity from the Sunni Arabs than he already does.

So those are the two possibilities facing Iraq-- roughly, reintegration into the Sunni-dominated Arab League, or an Iran alliance. In a way, the choices replicate those of the 1930s, Iraq's first decade of independence from Britain. The government of PM Hikmat Sulaiman in 1936-1937 rejected Arab nationalism and developed good relations with Iran. Sulaiman was a Turkmen and he served under the military dictatorship of Bakr al-Sidqi, a Kurd. There is a sense in which the al-Maliki-Talibani condominium of the past 4 years revives many geopolitical themes of the Sulaiman-Sidqi period. Their dire enemies were the Arab nationalist officers, who were focused on Palestine and felt more kinship with Egypt than with Iran. Allawi is more in that Arab nationalist tradition, though he is by heritage a Shiite.

Here is why I think the return of Allawi as prime minister is unlikely despite an apparently strong showing for his party in the elections.

The Saudi-owned pan-Arab London daily "The Middle East" [al-Sharq al-Awsat] is reporting that its correspondents are conveying an (unscientific) impression from exit polling that the Iraqi National List of Allawi is doing extremely well in the Sunni Arab provinces, and is running a strong second in the Shiite south (Kurds in the north typically vote only for Kurdish parties.) The report is rather breathless and I think the numbers are almost certainly exaggerated. It also alleges that current prime minister Nuri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition is getting 40% of votes in the Shiite south, which may be true for Baghdad and Basra (it did nearly that well in the provincial elections last year), but it would represent a major change in voting patterns in rural Shiite provinces such as Maysan and Dhi Qar.

Even so, without an unexpected landslide in the south, Allawi is unlikely to become prime minister. He will need 163 seats out of 325 to govern, and there is probably no way for his coalition to deliver them. Even leading lists will likely get less that 100 seats, and so will need post-election coalition partners. That small parties willing to ally with Allawi would have as many as 75 seats to deliver to him seems unlikely. So he'd have to deal with the big three--the State of Law, the National Iraqi Alliance, and the Kurdistan Alliance (or the Kurdistan parties generally). But they might well decline to deal with him, and could seek to exclude him instead.

Al-Maliki's State of Law list campaigned hard against the resurgence of Baathism, and Allawi and many on his list are ex-Baathists, so al-Maliki would have to eat a lot of crow to accept a junior position in an Allawi government. It seems unlikely, even if politics makes for strange bedfellows.

The Shiite religious parties grouped in the National Iraqi Alliance are said by the exit polls (for the little they are worth) to be coming in third. They are also highly unlikely to ally with Allawi, since he is an old-time CIA asset and ex-Baathist whose interim government was hostile to the Shiite religious authorities and to Iran.

Allawi appears to be attracting strong support in Ninevah Province in the north, which returned an Arab nationalist party in the provincial elections of 2009. Ninevah has a Sunni Arab majority and a Kurdish minority, but the Kurds had been dominant in provincial government and the security forces because the Sunnis had sat out the provincial elections of January 2005. There is very bad blood between the Arabs and Kurds in Ninevah.

So Allawi will find it difficult to ally with the Kurds while keeping his Sunni Arab nationalist base. But not only would he need the Kurds to get a simple majority if the other two big coalitions spurned him, but it will take a multi-party coaltion of 215 or so members of parliament to elect a president.

Whereas the numbers don't easily add up for Allawi, it seems likely that the State of Law, the Shiite fundamentalist parties of the NIA, and some smaller parties willing to join the two of them, could easily get to over 163, and they have a proven ability to work with the Kurds and independents to get to 215. In order to block this scenario, Allawi's list would have to get well over 100 seats and be united and disciplined.

As I suggested Sunday, one price al-Maliki might have to pay to gain the National Iraqi alliance as a partner is to agree to accelerate the US troop withdrawal (a key demand of the Sadr faction in the NIA).

Whatever the outcome of the voting (and a projected result based on one-third of the votes is scheduled to be announced on Wednesday), it may not be easily accepted by the losers. There is tremendous anxiety in Iraq about the possibility of ballot fraud in the wake of Sunday's parliamentary elections. The Iranian Arabic-language satellite station al-Alam reported on Sunday that the Shiite fundamentalist Sadr movement was alarmed to hear that ballot boxes were being transported from the provinces to Baghdad by US troops, and insisted that the US be kept away from those boxes. (They must have heard about Florida in 2000). Allawi is on Al Jazeera complaining about irregularities. He didn't say this, but campaigning continued through Sunday althought it was supposed to be forbidden after Friday late afternoon. In Basra, al-Hayat reports that anti-Allawi pamphlets were dropped by helicopter on Saturday and Snday.

Bottom line, another Allawi prime ministership is unlikely even if his list turns in strong performance.

Iraq LiveBlog: Election Day

1615 GMT: The Iraqi electoral commission is reporting that voter turnout is well above 50 percent in all but one of 11 provinces declared so far.

Strikingly, the turnout in Diyala, a former centre of Sunni insurgency, was more than 90 percent. That's a sharp contrast from the 2005 national elections, which were boycotted by the main Sunni parties.

1600 GMT: Iraqi security forces have announced a 10 p.m. (1900 GMT) curfew in Baghdad to allow safe transport of ballot boxes to election commission headquarters.


1552 GMT: Polls formally closed in Iraq almost two hours ago.

The official death toll from bombings and explosions today is 38, with 89 wounded. 25 died in a single incident when a Baghdad apartment building collapsed from an explosion (see 0645 GMT).

Ayad Allawi, the head of the National Accord Movement and one of the leading candidates for prime minister, gave a televised speech which both criticised the “weakness” of the government’s security operations and maintained that voters would be intimidated:

You know that Iraqis do not get scared. They will not be scared by tanks, bombings and explosions. They fought the British, as it is known, with simple weapons and kicked out the British empire. So this intimidation will not work.

1545 GMT: Back from a recording for Al Jazeera English's Inside Story on the significance of today's elections. The programme will air at 1730 GMT.

1310 GMT: Despite his disqualification from standing in the election, on the grounds that he had been sympathetic to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, leading Sunni politician Saleh al-Mutlaq has asked his supporters to vote:

I call you by the name of Iraq. I call on you by all the values of Iraq. No one should stay at home. All should go. These are the decisive hours. So go and trust God is with you and will reward you for all what you have paid in the past times.

1300 GMT:The spokesman for Baghdad Operations Command, Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, has claimed that today's bombings and mortar attacks “are miserable and desperate attempts that did not affect the atmosphere of the elections”.

Atta said at least one rocket-launching site had been located and struck west of Taji, a village on the northern outskirts of Baghdad. He added that the Iraqi military had requested that US forces increase air sorties. US Apache attack helicopters and their Iraqi counterparts have been circling above the Tigris River.

1110 GMT: AFP is hinting at manipulations and pressure in Kurdistan: "The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) -- allied to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani -- and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of regional president Massud Barzani have had a stranglehold on power for so long in Iraqi Kurdistan that people are afraid of even saying they voted for opposition parties."

In contrast, AFP correspondents are reporting long lines to vote in Sunni towns, "a positive sign for Iraq's fragile democracy".

1100 GMT: Awena is reporting that, in Erbil in Kurdistan, journalists have "civilian" escorts and are stopped when taking photographs of frauds or violations.

1010 GMT: New reports indicate that this morning's female suicide bomber (see 0715 GMT) struck a checkpoint, not a polling station.

1000 GMT: The Iraqi Independent Electoral Commission has put out an update at a press conference. More than 8000 polling centres, with 49,000 stations, opened this morning. They claim a high turnout with no serious incidents.

Ranj Alaaldin adds, "No serious fraud so far, names not on lists in some cases, security tight."

0915 GMT: A translator for AFP, as bombs go off across Baghdad while people go to the polls, "It's like a symphony."

0910 GMT: In a sign of confidence and/or defiance, the Iraqi authorities have lifted the ban on vehicles in Baghdad.

0900 GMT: Poll Sidelights....

"The BBC reports, "Eight people [were] arrested [on Saturday] following protests and scuffles at a polling station for Iraqi expatriates in north London. Police said 'spontaneous disorder' broke out at the Advait Cultural Centre, Wembley, at about 1330 GMT. The incident happened during a protest by a group which claimed it has been excluded from the polling facilities."

In Baghdad, a correspondent notes, "As usual kids use the election day to play football ON the highway."

0800 GMT: The death toll in Baghdad has risen to 24, according to the Interior Ministry.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki says the attacks "are only noise to impress voters but Iraqis are a people who love challenges and you will see that this will not damage their morale".

0730 GMT: All peaceful in Sulaimaniyah in eastern Kurdistan with no curfew on vehicles.

0720 GMT: Iraqis officials report two mortar bombs near polling stations in the western town of Ramadi and eight explosions in Fallujah. Samarra in the north has been hit by three mortars.

The official toll is now 16 people killed in attacks with more than 50 mortar rounds hitting targets across the capital.

0715 GMT: ABC News (US) correspondent reports a female suicide bomber has attacked a polling station in Al Karkh in Baghdad Province.

0710 GMT: A voter reports "huge turnout" and no apparent problems in Kirkuk.

0645 GMT: Polls opened for today's national election throughout Iraq at 7 a.m. local time (0400 GMT). More than 19 million Iraqis inside the country are eligible to vote; 4.7 million are in Baghdad. (Iraqis living outside the country have been voting throughout this week.)

Preliminary results are expected Wednesday. A summary of the parties and their leaders can be found in yesterday's entry previewing the elections.

More than 30 mortar rounds have hit Baghdad this morning, with three landing inside the "Green Zone" that includes the U.S. Embassy and many Iraqi government buildings. AFP reports that one person was killed and nine injured inside the Zone.

An explosion in the Ur neighbourhood in northeastern Baghdad has collapsed an apartment building, killing 12 people and wounding eight.

Analyst Ranj Alaaldin comments, "It's all kicking off in Baghdad,but nothing 2 serious as Iraq holds elections. Countless mortar attacks in Green Zone."