Where candidates hide, one Iraqi hits the stump

In a country where some candidates address the electorate only from behind blast-proof walls and others are so stealthy that their names are secret, Sadr City's Fatah al-Sheikh stands out.

In an election season with few campaign rallies and fewer public appearances by candidates, Mr. Sheikh incongruously displays all of the techniques of a Western politician. If a baby were around, he would surely kiss it. Here on Baghdad's meanest streets, he beams for a TV camera and backslaps passersby.

"Why should I be afraid?'' asks Sheikh, a onetime spokesman for a militant cleric who now heads his own list of candidates in Iraq's Jan. 30 election. "The people here know us and respect us. They know we'll fight and die with them."

The residents of Sadr City, an impoverished sprawl of 2 million Shiite Muslims on the northeast edge of Baghdad, have known much about fighting and dying over the years, and their sense of grievance and suspicion of outsiders is something that Sheikh is hoping to tap into. With nearly 10 percent of Iraq's population, the district is a rich electoral prize.

Iraq's election will be for a 275-member national assembly that will write a new constitution. With 111 different party lists, many with confusingly similar names, most get-out-the-vote efforts stress the numbers the lists have been assigned for the ballot.

Though turnout is expected to be low among the Sunni Arab minority who have always dominated Iraqi politics although they are only about 20 percent of the population, the country's Shiite Arabs are eager to vote and see the election as their chance to redress their historic omission from the country's politics.

The likely Shiite ascendancy is one of the reasons that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - the Jordanian-born Al Qaeda affiliate who has taken responsibility for many of Iraq's suicide attacks and assassinations - is working so hard to undermine the elections.

Radical Sunnis like Mr. Zarqawi view Shiites as apostates. In an audiotape attributed to him released on Sunday, Zarqawi called the vote "a wicked trap designed to put the [Shiites] into the seat of power." Last Friday, car bombs struck a Shiite mosque in Baghdad during prayers and a Shiite wedding south of the capital, killing at least 25.

Sheikh and 132 members of his electoral list - all from Sadr City - are diehard supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr, the young cleric whose Mahdi Army tied up US forces in this neighborhood and in the Shiite shrine city of Najaf last September until a truce was brokered by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most respected cleric. The city was renamed in honor of Sadr's father from Saddam City after the dictator's fall.

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