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Without fanfare, but with single-minded ruthlessness, the Shia Muslims of Iraq are preparing to take power for the first time in a hundred years.

Sunni Muslim leaders in the country have called for a boycott of the forthcoming election. And the Shias, who already have an inbuilt majority, expect to emerge clear winners when the vote is counted. Long subjugated, first by the divide-and-rule policy of the previous British occupation in the first half of the 20th century, when the minority Sunnis were promoted at their expense, and then by the Sunni-dominated Baath regime of Saddam Hussein, the Shias are determined to seize their chance.

With voters in large swaths of Sunni areas in central Iraq expected to stay away, either due to intimidation or on the instructions of Sunni political parties, the election will in reality be broadly confined to the Shia south. In the north the Kurds will turn out to vote, but they are already seen as more or less semi-autonomous.

No one expects the elections to be surrounded by anything but violence. The Sunni resistance in Iraq has declared that people voting are guilty of collaboration with the occupying powers, and have threatened ferocious retribution. Facing the attacks in the front line in the south are around 9,000 British troops. Their vulnerability was highlighted by the blast at the Shaibah Camp, 20 miles south of Basra, on Thursday, injuring nine soldiers from the Princess of Wales' Royal Regiment.

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