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As elections loom the world asks: which way now for Iraq?

Updated on 30 January 2009

By Lindsey Hilsum

Fourteen thousand candidates will stand in Iraq's elections and for the first time it will include Sunnis in the formerly violence-wracked province of Anbar.

They will be a test for Iraq's fledgling democracy and Barack Obama's policy of withdrawing US forces by 2011.

Tomorrow's provincial elections, with candidates from 400 groups, are predicted to be the most free and least violent since the US invasion in 2003.

Channel 4 News followed a candidate in Falluja, the scene of battles in 2004 between American forces and al-Qaida affiliated insurgents, and another in the largely Shi'ite town of Diwaniya.

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