If Sunnis won't vote, then what?

In addition to fear, confusion reigns for many. The biggest Shiite electoral list, the United Iraqi Alliance organized by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's top Shiite cleric, is backed by large numbers of Shiites simply because they trust Sistani. There is no Sunni corollary.

The best known Sunni group, the Iraqi Islamic Party, said last week that it was pulling out of the election. While there are numerous smaller Sunni groups participating, average Iraqis know little about the candidates. And while Sistani has urged Iraqis to vote as a religious duty, Sunni extremists have implied that voting is sinful.

In Wahid's Sunni neighborhood, you'd never guess that Iraq is gearing up for its first free national elections. There are no posters and so far, there has been no campaigning. While she says she watches television news, she hasn't been able to learn anything about the candidates. "I think they're all too afraid to go on TV."

There are also conspiracy theories circulating. Omar Saadi, a laborer, says he's not voting both out of fear and because he suspects the election results are being fixed by the US and Iran, the Shiite theocracy next door that has close ties to many of Iraq's leading Shiite politicians.

He's not the only one. King Abdullah, the Sunni monarch of Iraq's neighbor Jordan, has alleged that 1 million Iranians had entered Iraq to vote in the country's election.

While Iraqi officials say that's very unlikely, many Sunnis are willing to believe this and other claims of vote rigging. "I'm not going anywhere near this election - it's clearly dishonest,'' says Ahmad al-Mashdany, a retired government employee. "The American forces have prepared the electoral lists so that their candidates will win."

Mr. Cole says ambiguity over the actual numbers of Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq is one reason so many Sunni groups, particularly the more extreme ones, are reluctant to participate in the election. Most experts think Iraq is about 60 percent Shiite, 20 percent Sunni, and 15 percent Kurdish.

"A lot of these groups who have been claiming to speak for the Sunni Arabs wouldn't get that high a vote, so if they ran it would reveal how small their support actually is,'' he says. "By not participating they can position themselves to speak for the Sunni community afterwards."

Cole says there is still hope. The Shiite "leadership doesn't want a partition of Iraq, they very much want the country to stay together ... so they'll find some way to reach out to the Sunni Arabs.''

Meanwhile, in Shiite areas preparations for the election are building. Hassan Kazal Omran owns a store in a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad's Karrada district that distributes government-subsidized food. The subsidized food lists, of which all Iraqi's belong, are being used for voter registration, and thousands of these stores across Iraq have been asked to hand out the documents that will be used to verify voters on election day.

Mr. Omran says all but three of the 204 families registered at his store have taken their registration cards, but on a recent visit to the government food distribution center, that wasn't the same story he heard from his Sunni counterparts.

"In some neighborhoods, the store owners have been threatened with death if they carry out this duty, so they refused,'' he says. "I hope this changes. If we give in to threats and there is no election now, we'll just be stuck, stuck in this miserable situation."

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