Baghdad  - Unofficial, preliminary results from Saturday's provincial council elections suggest Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki's coalition may win provincial council elections in Iraq's nine southern provinces, Iraqi media reported Monday.

Baghdad's Afaq television station, which is funded by the ruling Dawaa Party, on Monday reported that preliminary results suggested that al-Maliki's list would perform well in a majority of Iraqi provinces, particularly in many areas of Baghdad and governorates to the south of the capital.

Baghdad's al-Sabbah newspaper, citing early, unofficial returns on Monday, predicted that predominantly Sunni coalitions would perform well in Iraq's central and northwestern provinces.

Some 7.5 million Iraqis, or about 51 per cent of those eligible, voted in provincial council elections in 14 Iraqi provinces on Saturday, according to figures from the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC), a slight decline from the last provincial council and parliamentary elections in January 2005.

But while overall voter participation declined somewhat, ethnically mixed and predominantly Sunni areas saw strong turnout, according to the IHEC: 65 per cent in predominantly Sunni Salahuddin province, 60 per cent in the divided and contested province of Nineveh, and 57 per cent in the similarly divided province of Diyala.

And if turnout declined slightly nationwide, fatalities declined sharply. Forty-four people were killed in election-related violence the last time Iraqis went to the polls to choose provincial council members. But on Saturday, only one person was reported killed. According to security sources quoted in the local media, that death was not related to the election.

In Nineveh, early results indicated that the Hadba coalition, led by Osama al-Najafi, a Sunni politician who has accused Kurdish militias in the province of attempting to "Kurdize" the province, was doing well.

On Sunday, armed men blew up the house of a candidate running on the Hadba list, Faisal al-Habbu, some 20 kilometres south of Mosul in Nineveh. Al-Habbu was not at home at the time, and no one was hurt, the Voices of Iraq news agency reported.

Sunnis in Nineveh largely boycotted the 2005 provincial council elections, effectively ceding the field to Kurdish parties. dpa