IRAQ’S Shia Muslims have joined forces to create the country’s first serious postwar political coalition, which could sweep to power in elections at the end of next month.

Despite continued violence and calls to postpone elections, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) yesterday named 228 candidates who will contest the polls on January 30.

The group could easily dominate the future 275-member assembly. It has the backing of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shia Muslims, who make up more than 60 per cent of the country’s 26 million people.

Dr Hussain al-Shahristani, a former professor at the University of Surrey who helped to draw up the coalition, said that the group represented “all Iraqis, not just the Shias”. He said: “The different parties and the national figures asked the religious authority to help it form an alliance that represents the Iraqi spectrum with its various religious, ethnic and geographic components.”

The list, which groups 25 parties and scores of independent candidates, includes members of other religious sects, including Sunni Muslims, Kurds, Yazidis and Turkomens. But it is dominated by Shia candidates and the coalition will be seen as reflecting their interests. The Shias are the largest community in Iraq, but they have been dominated for centuries by Sunni Muslim Arabs.

When Iraq came under British rule after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Shias launched a failed uprising in 1923 against the occupation.

The result was that Sunni rule continued in Baghdad. Many Shia leaders argue that the community cannot make the same mistake twice and should participate in a process likely to hand them power through the ballot box.

Shia candidates include members of former exile groups, such as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Islamic Dawa Party, and the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon-backed émigré. There are also figures linked to Hojatoleslam Moqtadr al-Sadr, who until three months ago was leading a violent Shia uprising against the US-led occupation of Iraq.

Yesterday’s announcement will be seen as a huge boost to the efforts by the Bush Administration and the government of Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi Prime Minister, to keep to the electoral timetable in the face of growing calls for a postponement, most recently by President Putin of Russia.

The declaration of the coalition could spur others to follow suit. Iraqi politicians have been debating whether to participate in the election campaign, which is widely expected to be plagued by violence from groups opposed to the Shias taking power.

The next important party list is expected to be drawn from the two main Kurdish groups, the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which have been enemies but have agreed to run under one banner.

There is still strong resistance from Iraq’s Sunni Muslims, who regard the election as a way of stripping them of their traditional rule. Yesterday the Association of Sunni Scholars, an influential religious group, repeated its call for Sunnis to boycott the polls, describing the election as “madness”.

“The association’s stance toward the elections is firm and unchanged — we will not take a part in these elections because . . . no elections can be held under the pressure of the Americans and the . . . deteriorating security situation,” Sheik Mohammed Bashar Al-Faidhi, a spokesman, said.

Some Sunnis have defied the call. Sheikh Fawaz al-Jarba, head of the powerful Shamar tribes in the northern city of Mosul, was among a handful of prominent Sunni Muslim figures on the UIA list. “I think that this list is a patriotic list. We hope that Iraqi people will back this list,” he said.

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