Iraq’s Sunni parties compete for votes in crucial election
Iraqi Sunnis are weighing whether to vote for candidates on a tribal or party-linked basis, try for independents or maybe not even vote at all.
Baghdad streets were teeming by early September with billboards and posters bearing candidates’ faces and the numbers they will be associated with on ballots to be cast in Iraq’s Oct. 10 early elections.
In the upscale, Sunni-majority western neighborhood of Mansour, a large billboard of influential Sunni politician Mohammed al-Karbouli shows him sporting a youthful, black baseball cap.
The image seems a nod toward Iraqi youth — a significant part of the constituency and the force behind the massive 2019 protests that brought down the last elected government.
Though those protests were held mainly in the Shia-dominant southern and central areas of Iraq, much of the Sunni community supported their aims but were concerned about being labeled “Islamic State terrorists” if they were to openly call for the downfall of the government.
