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BAGHDAD: Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was on track to claim several key Iraqi provinces on Sunday, bolstering his chances of keeping his job after an election crucial to ending years of bloody unrest.
A day after emerging on top in Baghdad, Maliki's State of Law Alliance held strong leads in two of the three biggest constituencies and was ahead in seven of the 18 provinces overall, although the figures were far from complete.
The results from the second parliamentary election since Saddam Hussein's ouster in 2003 come less than six months ahead of a US downsizing which will see all American combat troops leave the country by the end of August.
Maliki, a Shiite who had sought to portray himself as the leader who restored Iraq's security, was given comfortable leads in the oil-rich province of Basra, the third-biggest constituency, and the southern province of Karbala. Both provinces are mostly Shiite.
According to the latest results, State of Law was leading by about 100,000 votes in Basra, with the Iraqi National Alliance (INA), a coalition led by Shiite religious groups, coming in second.
State of Law already held leads in Baghdad, whose 70 seats account for more than a fifth of Iraq's 325-member Council of Representatives, as well as Babil, Najaf, Wasit and Muthanna.
The latter four provinces are all southern predominantly Shiite areas.
Sunday's figures were met with a frantic reaction in the national election commission's press room, as results from three provinces were put on one elevated flat-screen television.
The room is separated by a glass wall from a bank of computers where hundreds of election workers input data from tally sheets.
Lack of space on the screen forced election officials to scroll up and down on the surface to show all the figures, sparking shouts of anger from assembled journalists who were furiously taking notes.
Election officials have pleaded for patience as vote tabulation has been slowed by persistent computer crashes, which again affected work on Sunday.
Meanwhile, separate sets of figures released on Sunday showed secular ex-premier Iyad Allawi, a Shiite like Maliki, was ahead in the disputed oil-rich province of Kirkuk, against the expectations of analysts who had predicted it would likely be won by a Kurdish bloc.
Allawi was also leading in the Sunni bastion of Anbar, Iraq's biggest province by geography and the centre of a bloody insurgency in the early years of the US-led occupation, according to Sunday's results.
That brought to five the number of provinces in which his Iraqiya bloc was in pole position as he also held leads in Nineveh, Iraq's second-biggest constituency, and the predominantly Sunni central provinces of Diyala and Salaheddin.
The INA was ahead in the mostly Shiite southern provinces of Maysan, Diwaniyah and Dhi Qar.
Elsewhere, figures showed Kurdistania, an alliance of the Kurdish autonomous region's two long-dominant parties, was ahead in the battleground province of Sulaimaniyah and Iraq's northernmost province of Dohuk.
Earlier figures also put Kurdistania ahead in Arbil, seat of the Iraqi Kurdish regional government.
Despite State of Law's success, however, analysts have cautioned that rival political groupings could still manoeuvre to form a coalition government without it.
"There exists a desire to form an alliance between the INA and the Kurds, possibly also with Allawi," Baghdad University professor Hamid Fadhel told AFP on Saturday.
"They have all refused a long time to really see Maliki as the prime minister."
Qassim al-Abboudi, a senior election commission official, told reporters on Sunday that vote counts from each of Iraq's 18 provinces would top 60 percent on Monday.
Iraq's proportional representation electoral system makes it unlikely that any single grouping will clinch the 163 seats needed to form a government on its own, and analysts expect protracted coalition building.
Complete results from the general election are expected on March 18 and the final ones - after any appeals are dealt with - will probably come at the end of the month. - AFP/de
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