Knight-Ridder reports that “An Iraqi court has ruled that some of the most prominent Sunni Muslims who were elected to parliament last week won’t be allowed to serve because officials suspect that they were high-ranking members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.”
The article goes on to say that two members of Iyad Allawi’s slate (the Iraqi National List) are likely to be rejected as are five members of the Iraqi Accord Front (see this list for brief descriptions of the different electoral slates).
I’ll wait to hear what Juan Cole and others say about this. But from the outside it certainly seems like this would intensify the perceived marginalization of Sunnis and dominance of Shi’a religious parties that already seems to be the main result of the election.
