Middle East Focus-Arabia Deserta: Sadrists’ Five Finalists to Lead Iraq…………

Arabia Deserta

Sadrists’ Five Finalists to Lead Iraq…………

“The movement loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, which has emerged as a kingmaker in the aftermath of elections, will organise a vote to see who its supporters want to be Iraq's next leader, it said Tuesday. "We will conduct a consultation on Friday to find out which candidate the people want... from five proposed candidates," Ali al-Anbari, a spokesman for the radical Shiite cleric's bloc, said. Among the five names that will be put forward are sitting Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his main rival, secular former premier Iyad Allawi. Allawi's Iraqiya bloc finished first in Iraq's March 7 parliamentary elections with 91 seats in the 325-member Council of Representatives, two more than Maliki's State of Law Alliance. The three other candidates that will be put forward are former prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, current Shiite Vice-President Adel Abdel Mahdi, and Jaafar al-Sadr, the son of Mohammed Baqr Sadr, an ayatollah assassinated by Saddam Hussein in 1980 who founded Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party……”

How would they know who can vote and who can’t? It is not that they have a registered list of card-carrying Sadrists. Will it be like an open primary in the USA?
(This means, to me, that the Sadrists want to get rid of both Allawi and al-Maliki).
Cheers
mhg

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