BAGHDAD — Ninevah province, home to the mixed city of Mosul and the besieged city of Tal ‘Afar, is see­ing some _very_ strange num­bers. I’ve done back of the Excel enve­lope cal­cu­la­tions and have found this:
* In the Jan­u­ary elec­tion, which was boy­cotted by Sun­nis, there were 165,934 votes cast, accord­ing to the “Inde­pen­dent Elec­toral Com­mis­sion of Iraq”:http://ieciraq.org/English/Home.htm.
* In Octo­ber, accord­ing to “AP’s pre­lim­i­nary results”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051017/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_vote_results, there were 419,804 votes cast in Ninevah, an increase of 253,870 votes, or +152.99 per­cent.
* The num­ber of peo­ple vot­ing *for* the con­sti­tu­tion in Ninevah, accord­ing to the AP, was 326,774 (78 per­cent), with 90,065 vot­ing *against* it (21 per­cent). Less than 1 per­cent, or 2,965 votes, was dis­qual­i­fied.
By way of com­par­i­son, Tamim province, home to the dis­puted city of Kirkuk, saw 542,000 votes cast — an increase of 35.2 per­cent over Jan­u­ary — with 341,611 vot­ing “yes” (63 per­cent) and 195,725 vot­ing “no” (36 per­cent). You mean we’re sup­posed to believe that in Tamim, which is also a mixed province but which has had a steady stream of Kurds mov­ing in for the last two-and-a-half years, had *more than twice as many no votes as Ninevah?* And with the Kurds already pretty much own­ing Kirkuk? Color me skep­ti­cal.
What’s truly eyebrow-raising is that the num­ber of con­sti­tu­tional “yes” votes — 326,774 — is more than the total increase in votes over January’s turnout. That sug­gests that not only did all of the Sun­nis in Ninevah province, who largely boy­cotted the Jan­u­ary elec­tions turn out, but that they _all voted for the constitution._ That’s a very strange idea to me, as I’ve not met a sin­gle Sunni who voted for it here in Bagh­dad.
Ninevah is home to Mosul, a mixed city of about 2 mil­lion Arabs, Turko­mans and Kurds, as well as Tal’Afar, the mostly Turko­man city of 500,000 that U.S. and Iraqi forces stormed last month. Anec­do­tal reports are that a) Sunni Arabs have come out in droves, mainly to vote down the con­sti­tu­tion, and b) the con­sti­tu­tion was very unpop­u­lar in Tal’Afar because of mil­i­tary actions there.
Now, sev­eral pos­si­bil­i­ties spring to mind: Sunni Arabs in the north really _love_ the idea of the new national char­ter, but I find this unlikely, to say the least. In fact, I only sug­gest it for the gig­gle fac­tor. Another pos­si­bil­ity is that the vote was bla­tantly fixed. A third pos­si­bil­ity is that the Kurds moved thou­sands of peo­ple into Mosul to skew the vote. Oddly enough, I heard Sun­nis mak­ing just this charge in the run-up to the Saturday’s ref­er­en­dum. A third pos­si­bil­ity is a com­bi­na­tion of the last two. The vote was rigged _and_ the Kurds moved peo­ple in.
Now, con­trast­ing points that prove I don’t know what I’m talk­ing about, sug­gested by col­leagues:
# Mosul is an Iraqi Islamic Party strong­hold. The IIP called on its sup­port­ers to vote “yes” after a deal last week to open up the con­sti­tu­tion to early amend­ments. This split the Sunni oppo­si­tion to the char­ter.
# The Sun­nis sim­ply don’t make up 20 per­cent of Iraq. There hasn’t been a reli­able cen­sus in years and not only do the Sun­nis not make up 42 per­cent of Iraq as Saleh Mut­laq, a mem­ber of the National Dia­logue Coun­cil, claims, but they’re much fewer than the 20 per­cent most peo­ple assume.
# Ninevah and Mosul aren’t Sunni strong­holds. It’s con­ven­tional wis­dom, but maybe that’s wrong.
# Mosul was a lot more vio­lent in Jan­u­ary, keep­ing the vote there down. Per­haps now, with less vio­lence, more Kurds — per­haps half of the total increase — were able to come out and vote.
# The Turko­mans aren’t a fac­tor. Money quote from cyn­i­cal col­league: “There are more Turko­man par­ties than there are Turko­mans.“
# The AP num­bers are so pre­lim­i­nary, they’re flat-out wrong.
The pos­si­bil­ity exists that all of these pos­si­bil­i­ties have played into the dynamic in Ninevah, lead­ing to wild num­bers, and I’ve not been able to reach a stringer in Mosul yet to get more infor­ma­tion. But if these num­bers hold, there’s some­thing very, very rot­ten in the north.
(Hat tip to var­i­ous com­menters who alerted me to the num­bers here.)

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