This article, by Sam Dagher, was origunally published in The NewYork Times, January 18, 2009
A member of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's political party who was a candidate in the provincial elections was killed by gunmen on Friday as he drove away from a campaign event in a province south of Baghdad.
The shooting came as Iraq's Islamist parties, including the movement of the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, stepped up campaigning for the Jan. 31 elections during Friday Prayer.
The candidate, Haitham Kadhim al-Husaini, a cleric who belonged to Mr. Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party, was attacked after the campaign appearance in the Jabala district, 25 miles south of Baghdad in Babil Province.
Four other party officials who were traveling with Mr. Husaini were wounded in the attack, said a provincial police official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.
Mr. Husaini was district commissioner in Jabala and was a prominent candidate for a seat on the council in Babil, which is predominantly Shiite, as part of Mr. Maliki's election coalition.
Two years ago, Mr. Husaini's wife and four children were killed when gunmen attacked the family's home in Jabala, a mixed Sunni-Shiite area that had been the scene of some of the worst episodes of sectarian violence in the province before government-backed tribal militias were created to combat insurgents.
On Thursday, Mr. Maliki said that there might be a surge in violence and what he described as ''acts of sabotage'' before the elections.
On Dec. 31, a Sunni Arab contender for the provincial council in the northern city of Mosul was gunned down on the street.
Mr. Maliki's Dawa party and another Shiite party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, have been competing intensely for control of provincial governments in the predominantly Shiite center and south of Iraq.
Although the two parties are coalition partners in government and in the Parliament, they have been drifting apart, and the campaigning in the provincial races has become acrimonious. Some of Mr. Maliki's supporters have accused the Islamic Supreme Council of having plotted to oust him as well as having campaigned inappropriately during a recent Shiite religious holiday.
Sheik Jalaluddin al-Saghir, a member of Parliament and a leader of the Islamic Supreme Council party, called these accusations painful and insulting during a sermon at a Baghdad mosque on Friday.
Mr. Sadr's movement, seeking to capitalize on this rift among the major Shiite parties, urged followers on Friday to vote for two lists that it said were made up of independent candidates. The Sadr movement is not formally endorsing candidates.
''Everyone must vote in the elections to prevent a sinister plot to divide Iraq,'' said Sheik Salah al-Obeidi, Mr. Sadr's spokesman, during a sermon at a mosque in Kufa near the Shiite holy city of Najaf. Afterward, candidates handed out pamphlets.
After prayers on the street in front of Mr. Sadr's main office in the Sadr City district of Baghdad, a group of young men swarmed around Ali Mohammed Muslim, who was running for a provincial council seat. He is a senior member of both the political and military wings of Mr. Sadr's movement in Sadr City.
Mr. Muslim said that if elected, he would work to fight corruption. He said that much of the money set aside by the Iraqi government and the United States for the reconstruction of Sadr City had been either delayed or entangled in corruption.
''This period has benefited us, because it showed that all their promises were empty,'' he said.
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