Political turmoil follows barring of hundreds from Iraq ballot

A knot of young men stood Friday outside the Umm Al Qura Mosque, once a nest of insurgent fervor where a year of relative tranquility has softened the jagged edges of nearby bullet holes. They were angry, frustrated and quick to punctuate their denunciations of a decision to bar scores of Sunni candidates from Iraqi elections in March with a single word: sharaiyya, Arabic for legitimacy. "We're not going to boycott because our candidates were disqualified," said one of them, Suheil Najm. "We'll boycott because the elections won't be legitimate." The decision to disqualify nearly 500 candidates, many of them Sunni Muslim, plunged Iraqi politics into turmoil on Friday. Leading candidates vowed a boycott of the vote, perhaps the most important since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Protests were threatened, and anger rippled through Iraq's Sunni communities. But beyond the din of recriminations, the decision posed an even greater challenge to Iraq's nascent body politic, lawmakers, officials and residents say. A hard-won legitimacy of Iraq's political process that had finally turned elections into an arena of contest for virtually all factions here looked dangerously tattered on Friday, they said.