The fact is that the baathists and nationalists called a truce for the duration of the elections. They are using bullets and ballots (that is a quote from some report I read). However, I have linked in a couple of links for your perusal.
Arabic news
Here is an extract as translated by Juan Cole (
www.juancole.com).
[ QUOTE ]
Al-Hayat says that the "secular" guerrillas say that they had declared a 3-day truce so that Sunni Arabs could put representatives in parliament, but that they would now return to attacking US and coalition troops. It is suggestive that the two Sunni politicians doing best in this round are Adnan Dulaimi and Salih Mutlak, who may well be the Gerry Adams of Iraq.
It quotes Abu Maysar (age 52), a former member of the Baath Party and a militia leader in Fallujah as saying, "We will continue our armed struggle as long as the Occupation and the agents it brought with it continue in power." The secular guerrillas adopted a deliberate policy of encouraging a Sunni vote, and they pledged to protect the voters from reprisals by the Muslim extremists who opposed the electoral process. Abu Maysar maintained that the current Iraqi government is determined to wipe out the former Baath Party members. He said that if they just tried to play parliamentary politics, they would be like lambs to slaughter.
A local leader in the Army of Muhammad (made up of former Baath intelligence operatives) said, "This does not mean we are giving up our jihad. We consider that we will be, in the coming days, committing violence against the Americans and their supporters in the Iraqi army."
[/ QUOTE ]
Here is another report quoting the same arabic source.
Asia Times
[ QUOTE ]
Moreover, former members of the Ba'ath Party and other militia leaders have lost no time asserting that despite the Sunni participation in the elections, their armed resistance to the American military occupation would be resumed. (Since the elections, 10 Iraqis, including five police officers and an American, have been killed.)
Al-Hayat quoted a Ba'ath communique condemning the elections as an American plot to divide Iraq along ethnic and religious lines and vowing that resistance would not end until US troops left Iraqi soil. So much for the delicate distinction that American spokesmen were making between "Ba'athists" and "Saddamists"
[/ QUOTE ]
Like I said before, you may wish to reassess your reading list, moving form propaganda to news and from opinion to analysis.
You are free to find your own Arabic transaltions of the referred to link as well.
Edit: Oops, I meant to reply to 6M's "post"