A Look at Some Early (And Oblique) Political Ads, Ahead of Iraq’s Elections
Here in the capital, as in the oil town of Basra to the south, parliamentary hopefuls and political parties plastered roadside billboards and buildings with posters that subtly support their races, before a ban on campaigning was lifted Tuesday. While Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission, which oversees the country’s vote, said it complained about some of the ads, there was little it could do to stop them, it said. By steering clear of direct references to the elections, they technically avoided running afoul of the rules.
They are now fixtures in the landscape here—among the many more overt ads that have sprung up since campaigning officially began Tuesday—each an oblique call for support at the April 30 polls.
“We informed some parties to get rid of those signs but we couldn’t penalize them since they aren’t direct electoral signs,” said Safa al Musawi, a member of the electoral commission’s board. “This can be considered an intimation to advertising which is completely unacceptable.”
Some parties whose ads actually did violate the rules were fined, he said.
The polls are the first parliamentary races since the last American forces left the country in December 2011. They come amid a recent spike in deadly violence and a growing insurgency led by Sunni extremists in Iraq’s western provinces that threaten to leave permanent sectarian scars on an infant Iraqi state, The Wall Street Journal said.
The Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham, or ISIS, has led a bloody standoff with Iraqi police and military in the Sunni-majority city of Fallujah since early January. Over the past few weeks, the group has distributed fliers announcing that polling stations and voters are legitimate targets for violence.
Despite the rising threats, many Iraqi politicians and analysts believe that Nouri Al Maliki, who has overseen the country during a time of political gridlock and deteriorating security since he first became prime minister in 2006, will achieve a hard-fought victory.
Given his stature, it’s no surprise that billboards for Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-majority State of Law coalition are ubiquitous in Baghdad and Shiite-areas in southern Iraq. The SOL’s task is easier than others. Its billboards rely on its well-known “With Us” symbol, rendered in florid Arabic script. In most, if not all, cases, the signs make a not-so-subtle allusion to the Iraqi military’s fight against ISIS forces in Iraq’s west.
The sign above, seen in Baghdad, shows a brave rifle-wielding soldier next to a tank and states simply “Expel Terrorism” below SOL’s “With Us” logo.
This one, above, also in Baghdad, shows the hand of a soldier and the hand of a man in a business suit tearing apart a black flag emblazoned with ISIS’s Arabic acronym. The text reads: “Strangers will not settle on our land.”
In Iraq’s second city of Basra, the center of the country’s Shiite majority, parliamentary candidates connected to the region’s sprawling tribes and clans found other language to get around the early campaign ban, The Wall Street Journal added.
A sign in Basra, shown below, has the tribe of Beni Ka’ab “congratulating and supporting” its “son” Tawfeeq Mohi Al Ka’abi, a candidate for the hardline religious Shiite Ja’afari Party, a member of the National Reform Coalition. Efforts to contact Mr. Al Ka’abi were unsuccessful.
Other candidates dressed up their posters as expressions of support for the army’s fight against terror.
A sign in Basra, below, simply states “Support for the Armed Forces” above an image of soldiers, tanks and helicopters arrayed in battle. The stirring image, according to the text below it, comes courtesy of the “the media office of parliament member Engineer Rehab Na’ama Al Aboudah,” a member of Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party.
Ms. Aboudah said her signs were intended to clarify her position on the military: She supports its fight against terrorists. “I paid for these and not my block,” said Ms. Aboudah. “Those signs show my positions on current events. The people who will vote for me need to know their representative’s positions on different issues.” She said the electoral commission had not contacted her about the ads.
In another Basra poster, below, sitting parliamentarian Ouday Awad, a former member of Moqtada Al Sadr’s political bloc, presents an image that is uncannily similar to the famous American Iwo Jima picture, with soldiers lifting the Iraqi flag over ground seared with ISIS’s Arabic acronym. Like Ms. Aboudah, Mr. Awad said the electoral commission had not contacted him. He paid for the poster, he said, to “show the people my position on what’s going on in Anbar and to support the armed forces.”
“These are men,” the text on his poster reads. “But not just any men,” The Wall Street Journal concluded.
