IRAQ: The likely winners of Iraq's election on Sunday are campaigning quietly but with confidence, Jack Fairweather reports from Baghdad.
In a darkened hall, candidates for Iraq's main Shia party sit listening to a turbaned cleric speaking into a microphone. They're being told how to campaign for the election without getting killed.
The instructions are simple - avoid public places and don't reveal your identity, the cleric advised. He recommended that most candidates stay at home as much as possible.
At the election headquarters for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq few underestimate the dangers of the election trail. But equal to the fear is the utter certainty among officials that SCIRI, the largest party on the Shia list expected to dominate next week's election, will be at the heart of government.
"It's not so important that we campaign in a traditional sense," said Mr Abu Muntesar al-Imarah, a SCIRI official and campaign manager for the United Iraqi Alliance, the main Shia list.
Hope, fear and a whiff of arrogance: such are the mood swings inside SCIRI headquarters.
For a party that was set-up in Iran in the 1980s to promulgate Islamic revolution in Iraq but now says it upholds secular values, dealing with the changing winds of fortune has become part of a careful political act.
"We want to appeal to the broadest number of Iraqis. We need to build a consensus between parties to rule this country. Only that way will be able to get elected," said Mr al-Imarah", a 42-year-old Shia, Iranian-educated, intelligent, and speaking with a hint of irony.
Not only does the list containing SCIRI have the largest Shia parties, it also has the approval of the most revered Shia spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani - explaining some of Mr al-Imarah's apparent nonchalance.
He insists that the involvement of Ayatollah Sistani in the election does not undermine the secular platform on which SCIRI and other Shia parties are standing for election. "We represent a very broad front," said Mr al-Imarah.
However, many outside the Shia south believe SCIRI is only playing with secularism. Once in power the mask will fall away and the party will return to its core Islamic beliefs, they say.
Many are worried that Ayatollah Sistani, who is seen as representing a particularly Iraqi form of Islamic conservatism, will be supplanted by clerics with closer ties to Iran. Some of those fears were put to the test last week by a rare press conference organised by al-Imarah at SCIRI headquarters for leading politicians from the United Iraqi Alliance.
Unlike more lowly candidates on the list who sneak out via back entrances, or live permanently at the HQ, there was no effort to disguise the arrival of the signatories who pulled up at the building, a mansion formerly owned by Tariq Aziz, in platoons of armoured jeeps.
These are the men likely to form Iraq's future government: Mr Ibrahim al-Jaferi, head of the large Shia Dawa party, Mr Ahmed Chalabi, former Pentagon favourite, and Sheikh Farnaz al Jabbar, a Sunni tribal leader from Mosul.
It was, very visibly, an attempt to appeal across the political spectrum.
Mr al-Jaferi spoke about his confidence that all Iraqis would take part on the election, and stressed the need for consensus building between Iraq's different ethnic groups.
In the background stood Mr Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the turbaned head of SCIRI who is likely to pull the strings of power after the elections, nodded his head in approval. No mention was made of a political agenda, a characteristic of most political parties who have grouped themselves along ethnic lines.
In an earlier interview with the Daily Telegraph, interim Finance minister and SCIRI member Mr Abid Mahdi denied that his party was unduly influenced by Islamic ideas from Iran, and insisted that the new government must reach out to different groups, including Sunnis, and invite them into government.
"The leading lists must create an environment where other communities can find a home," said Mr Mahdi.
However, some Iraqi and US officials, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that while at the higher levels SCIRI is committed to secularism, at lower levels the party remains an organisation largely funded and trained by Iran to establish a more conservative state.
At the end of the press conference, Mr al-Imarah shrugged aside the suggestion. He was delighted the conference, was attended by several Arabic television channels. "It's very hard to get our message out people beyond our organisation at the moment, which is why speaking on television is so important," he said.
Mr al-Imarah left to oversee the printing of several thousand campaign posters - emblazoned with the face of Ayatollah Sistani, and the slogan "for a united Iraq". "Everyone loves Sistani," he said.