Sunnis feel chill in new Iraq

Another pensioner on the bench watches the man go. "Some of us aren't ready to accept change," says Muhamed al-Hezraji, whose tattooed green dots on his face mark him as a member of a rural tribe. "But I think I could live with a Shiite president, as long as he isn't one of the religious figures.... I don't think they put Iraq first."

Sitting over a breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage in Mustafa's, an airless dive attached to the bustling Kemp Street Soukh, Mohamed al-Mumayiz says he hated Hussein and is grateful for the US invasion that liberated Iraq. Mr. Mumayiz, who worked as an interpreter for US troops until recently, saying he quit because he couldn't stomach participating in raids on local homes anymore, is nevertheless confident that America may end up as the final protector of Sunni political interests. "They say there's going to be a totally free election soon, but I'm pretty sure that they'll engineer the elections," he says. "They will never allow two Shiite states [Iraq and Iran] right next to each other."

It's a common refrain in Adhamiya, where even those who considered the invasion a crime and see Hussein as a hero say they believe that the US is the principal balancing power against a Shiite ascendancy now.

That may prove to be a vain hope, with top coalition administrator Paul Bremer saying Iraq is on course for its first free and truly democratic elections in 2005. Mr. Bremer also said Wednesday that 500 low-level Iraqi prisoners who have been held for the past eight months would be released as a show of reconciliation. The first 100 are due to be set free Thursday.

A minority in the Sunni community say they reject the idea of elections altogether. These are represented largely by the preachers and Muslim adherents who frequently refer to themselves as Salafi - a group whose members share many of the same beliefs and goals of the radical Wahhabi of Saudi Arabia.

Hussein's regime was resolutely secular, and for much of his reign he viewed Islamist sentiments with suspicion. But in the 1990s, with challenges growing to his rule, he began to support some Sunni preachers, adding an Islamic verse to the national flag and encouraging some radical preachers.

The fruits of those efforts can be seen outside State Islamic College in Adhamiya, where a group of young imams gather after class, sporting pristine white turbans that declare their status as students of the Koran.

Mahmoud al-Zubia, a student, begins an oration on what Iraq needs by first denying that the Shiites even exist as a separate sect in Islam.

"There is nothing dividing Muslims; this is just a fiction created by Zionists and foreigners to divide us and create conflicts among us," he says. He adds that there can't be truly democratic elections in Iraq because so many Iraqis have been led into "error" about the nature of their religion.

"The only leader of Iraq should be a man who truly understands the Koran and the traditions of the prophet,'' he says. "The Americans won't allow us to have a leader like that - so we must find another way than elections to continue our struggle."

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