A coalition of Shiite parties won 128 of 275 seats in last month's parliamentary elections, falling 10 votes short of a majority, Iraqi election officials announced today.
The results mean that the Shiite group will remain the dominant force in Iraq's new government, but will still need to form a coalition. In second place came a coalition of Kurdish parties, who took 53 seats. The largest Sunni party, the Iraqi Accordance Front, won 44 seats and another Sunni party won 11. A party headed by former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, took 25 seats. The Sunnis will have more representatives in the new parliament than they did in the old, whose elections they mostly boycotted last January.
