A suicide bomber killed 15 people in northeastern Iraq on Thursday, Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki rode a nationalist, law-and-order message to a decisive victory over the Shi'ite religious parties who previously dominated Iraq, preliminary election results showed Thursday. The success of Maliki's State of Law coalition in provincial polls in Baghdad and the Shi'ite south gives a leader once derided as weak a mandate for a strong central state, and crucial momentum before national elections later this year. It also marks a shift away from the overtly sectarian politics that gripped Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion. “This shows that the Iraqi voter wants to hear nationalist speeches as well as religious speeches,” government spokesman Ali Al-Dabbagh told Reuters by telephone from Kuwait. “The first priority for Iraqis is security. The prime minister achieved good security for Iraq. The Iraqi voter preferred to give his vote to the one who brought security.” Maliki, himself a Shi'ite, campaigned on a non-sectarian law-and-order platform, even as his opponents adopted overtly religious slogans and images. Maliki's State of Law won by huge margins in the capital and Iraq's second largest city Basra, and scored smaller but substantial victories in seven of eight other Shi'ite provinces in the south. Secularist and independent parties also fared well across Iraq, the results showed, after being largely swamped by religious parties in the last election in 2005. By contrast, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (ISCI) – until now the dominant party among Iraq's Shi'ite majority – relied on relentless Shi'ite religious images and slogans but failed to win a single province. Results released by the independent election commission showed Maliki's State of Law bloc winning 38 percent of votes in Baghdad and 37 percent in Basra, the province that includes the second largest city and accounts for most of Iraq's oil exports. Suicide attack occurred at a popular restaurant in the town in Khanaqin on the border with the Kurdistan region in Iraq's north, which has seen a stand-off in the past between govt and Kurdish forces.
