Sunni party deny Iraq's national elections

The Sunni wing of Iraq's leading nonsectarian political coalition is dropping out of next month's elections, saying the vote will be illegitimate because of a Shiite-ordered ballot purge of hundreds of candidates.

A statement Saturday by the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue stopped short of urging Sunnis to boycott the March 7 parliamentary elections.

But it invited other political parties to withdraw. At least one, the National Council for Tribes of Iraq, said it would.

The Front for a National Dialogue is headed by Sunni lawmaker Saleh al-Mutlaq.

He was barred from running for re-election after a Shiite vetting panel accused him of having ties to Saddam Hussein's outlawed Baath party. Al-Mutlaq has said he quit the party in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, with tempers high ahead of Iraq's national elections next month, even tearing down a campaign poster is a flash point between Sunnis and Shiites.

A spate of defaced, torn down or otherwise trashed posters of candidates across the country has prompted the Shiite-led Iraqi government to vow to impose prison sentences of up to a year on vandals.

But others, particularly Sunnis, see the harsh punishment as just the latest display of power by Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his allies. It comes on the heels of a ballot purge of more than 440 candidates, most of them Sunni, who are accused of being loyalists to Saddam Hussein's former Baathist regime.

"Democracy allows for any citizen to express his or her feelings," a 33-year-old man who would only identify himself by his nickname, Abu Harir, said Friday in Azamiyah, a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad. "It is unfair to impose this punishment."

Vandals burned some of al-Maliki's posters and threw black paint on those of former Premier Ayad Allawi in at least two Shiite-dominated Baghdad neighborhoods early Friday. Other posters were ripped. Both al-Maliki and Allawi are Shiite.

"One-year punishment is not harsh because of the corruption caused by this act," Shiite lawmaker Abbas al-Bayati, a member of al-Maliki's political coalition, said Friday. "They turn the legal competition to a violent one because when they rip the posters of one list, this list might react and by this they create violence in the street.