Recount shows Iraq’s Muqtada Al-Sadr retains election victory

[Saif al-Arab]

Recount shows Iraq’s Sadr retains election victory

An Iraqi man celebrates with a picture of Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr during the general election in Baghdad on May 14, 2018. (AFP)
Updated 10 August 2018
REUTERS
August 10, 201803:53
636

• Iraq’s Independent High Election Commission released the results of the recount on its website early on Friday
• The IHEC said the results of the recount matched the initial results from 13 of Iraq’s 18 provinces

BAGHDAD: Populist Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr retained his lead in Iraq’s May parliamentary election, results of a nationwide recount of votes showed on Friday, positioning him to play a central role in forming the country’s next government.
Iraq’s Independent High Election Commission (IHEC) released the results of the recount on its website early on Friday. Parliament ordered the recount in June after widespread allegations of fraud cast doubt on the integrity of the ballot.
The IHEC said the results of the recount matched the initial results from 13 of Iraq’s 18 provinces.
The winning parties are still embroiled in negotiations over forming the next governing coalition three months after the vote, with no sign of an imminent conclusion.
The recount did not alter the initial results significantly, with Sadr keeping his tally of 54 seats.
A group of Iran-backed Shiite militia leaders remained second behind Sadr’s bloc but gained an extra seat that pushed them to 48, with incumbent Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi’s bloc still in third place with 42 seats.
Abadi, who is seeking a second term in office, is heading a fragile caretaker government until a new one is formed.
The political uncertainty over the makeup of the new government has raised tensions at a time when public impatience is growing over poor basic services, unemployment and the slow pace of rebuilding after a three-year war with the Islamic State militant group.
Anger is mounting with frequent protests, backed by Iraq’s top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, taking place in the Shiite southern provinces.
Sadr, who also backs the protests, has issued a list of 40 conditions he says the new prime minister has to meet, including being politically independent and not running for re-election, for his bloc to join a governing coalition and that he would go into opposition if the conditions were not met.

Recount

The manual recount has been politically contentious from the start, although it was never expected to widely alter the results.
The IHEC said on Monday it had completed the recount but was forced to cut the process short in the capital, Baghdad, because voting records had been destroyed by a warehouse fire two months ago.
The fire broke out hours after parliament ordered the recount and suspended the electoral commission’s leadership, replacing it with a panel of judges, after a government report concluded there were serious violations in an initial count using an electronic vote-counting system.
The digitised system was intended to help regulate and speed up vote-counting. However, critics have claimed the tabulation system in electronic voting machines that were used for the first time were not secure enough from tampering.
The IHEC ignored an anti-corruption body’s warnings about the credibility of the electronic machines used in the election, a document seen by Reuters showed.
The devices, provided by South Korean company Miru Systems under a deal with the IHEC, are at the heart of fraud allegations that led to the manual recount.
Concerns about the election count center on discrepancies in the tallying of votes by the voting machines, mainly in the Kurdish province of Sulaimaniya and the ethnically mixed province of Kirkuk, and suggestions that the devices could have been tampered with or hacked into in order to skew the result.

http://www.arabnews.com/node/1353911/middle-east

https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/muqtada-al-sadr-riyadh-serves-as-the-father-of-all.511828/







@SALMAN F @OutOfAmmo

 

[Saif al-Arab]

 

[maximuswarrior]

That is one massive defeat for the US. Nothing going their way.

 

[BATMAN]

Can't say it's good or bad for Iraq and region!

 

[Saif al-Arab]

That is one massive for defeat for the US. Nothing going their way.

The Iranian Mullah's are the biggest losers here as Al-Sadr is one of the few truly nationalistic Shia Mullah's in power in Iraq (Mullah's with their own political parties, militias etc.) who is openly anti-Iranian Mullah regime and time and time emphasis that Iraqi Shia Arabs are a key component of the Arab world and that their future lies in the cooperation between them and Arab countries, especially neighboring ones such as KSA.

He is also an exponent of the Najaf Hawza rather than the Qom school (Wilayat al-Faqih).

The likes of Al-Maliki (incompetent cretin and Mullah agent by large, who should have been executed for corruption alone let alone for treason and destroying Iraq for years), the traitor Hadi al-Amiri, etc. tried to do everything in their power to stop Al-Sadr from gaining power. They even burned down an election office that hosted a huge number of votes. One of Al-Sadr's bodyguards was assassinated in Najaf etc. They tried everything to prevent his election but failed.

The US still has influence in Iraq (they use Iraqi air bases to aid the SDF and Kurds in Syria across the border) and they can always play the "Barzanistan" card. Iraq's current political system (post 2003) is their invention too. Iraq (officially at least) has also agreed with the sanctions on Iran due to US pressure but certainly also personal interests.

Can't say it's good or bad for Iraq and region!

Time will tell. Al-Sadr is more of "strongman" than Al-Abadi who did a good job (despite corruption being an epidemic in Iraq) many, many times better than the Al-Maliki cretin. If not those two the other alternative would be Hadi al-Amiri which would/could be worse than even Al-Maliki.

The system as a whole is far from optimal. The constitution, sectarianism in politics (that the constitution facilitates), too many political parties, Mullah's with their own parties and militias answering to foreign hostile regimes (for Iraq and the Iraqi people), extreme levels of corruption, inefficient economic policies, lack of real tax incomes (effective tax collection), too many services have been subsidized by the government such as electricity and water, then there is the whole Northern Iraq/Barzanistan challenge (a tumor for Baghdad by large), a demographic challenge (due to the quickly growing population), huge number of youth waiting for more and better opportunities, unemployment etc.

Yet despite those challenges, they are all solvable and Iraq's potential is huge. It just requires much better leadership. If Al-Abadi was the beginning of a new modern era of truly beneficial change, this would bond well for the future.

However I still insist that the entire political system must change and obviously "militia/Mullah" policies as I call it "made in Iran" or "facilitated in Iran" should be combatted by the Iraqi state otherwise real progress will never occur. No successful state has such a system in place.

Anyway we will see what the future will bring. Right now the basics should get the priority and Iraq should be pragmatic in its foreign policy. This is not Iraq pre-Gulf War with a huge military or Iraq of the 1970's.

 

[BATMAN]

He is also an exponent of the Najaf Hawza rather than the Qom school (Wilayat al-Faqih).

While i used to work in Saudi Arabia, I had bunch of Pakistani Shia colleagues, one of them used to mention something similar.
I vaguely remember, he said he is a follower of some Iraqi mulla (surely not Sadar) instead of Qum /iran. He was the only shia in group who used to send charity to Iraq instead of Iran.
I don't know this religious jugulary but i understand nationalism.

 

[SALMAN F]

 

[Saif al-Arab]

The last video is the best one. A classic.