Voting results of Iraqi military and police forces from the Dec. 15 parliamentary election were made public on Monday and indicate that Iraq's security forces, touted as largely representative of the population, in fact have few Sunnis in their ranks.
 
This is significant because Sunni Arabs, who make up 20 percent of Iraq, came out in large numbers for the election in hopes of taking a share of political power along with the Shiites and Kurds.
 
Sunnis say they fear that the security forces will be used against them.
 
While it has been known that Sunnis were underrepresented among the new police and military, the voting data provide the first real indication of the complete reversal of the fortunes of the Sunnis, who ran those forces under the ousted Saddam Hussein. Voting in Iraq has been nearly exclusively along ethnic and sectarian lines.
 
The newly released figures also suggest that Kurdish pesh merga militiamen have a disproportionate presence in the security forces, perhaps even more so than the Shiites, who comprise three-fifths of the population.
 
The figures are far from exact and are nothing like a census of the security forces.
 
But they do provide some strong clues to the ethnic composition and political sympathies of Iraqi soldiers, a crucial yet elusive data set in a country struggling to overcome deep sectarian divisions and defeat an entrenched insurgency dominated by Sunnis.
 
The data were just one sliver of preliminary electoral results that show that Shiites will once again dominate the new Parliament.
 
After a relative peaceful respite following the Dec. 15 election, at least 70 Iraqis have been slain in the past four days, including 20 killed Monday. Five policeman died in an early morning ambush in Baquba, while a half-dozen car bombs in Baghdad killed at least five Iraqis. A rocket-propelled grenade also killed an American soldier on patrol in the capital.
 
Though heavy turnout won Sunni parties a sizable block of Parliament seats, they have accused the ruling Shiites of widespread electoral fraud and demanded a new election. But any chance of a large-scale election re-run has been all but ruled out.
 
Officials from the Iraqi independent electoral commission say they see no reason for new elections - an opinion seconded on Monday by the chief United Nations elections official here.
 
"We do think there might have been fraud in a few isolated places but we don't see this widespread fraud people are talking about," Craig Jenness, head of the UN electoral assistance team, said Monday. "It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty credible given the circumstances."
 
Although more attention has been focused on the ethnic makeup of the Iraqi government, the U.S. military is sensitive to the perception that the Iraqi forces have few Sunnis, especially in the north, where Kurdish officials have made plain their desire to expand their territory into Sunni and Turkmen regions.
 
American ground commanders in restive northern and western Sunni regions have also expressed concern about the ability of Kurdish and Shiite troops to interact effectively with local residents and pacify areas dominated by Sunni insurgents. To the commanders, a proportionate representation of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish soldiers is vital to the country's long-term stability and cohesion.
 
But on that score there still appears to be a way to go, the election results made public Monday suggest.
 
The disparity was revealed in a tally of one special category of votes overwhelmingly composed of ballots cast by members of the security forces, according to election supervisors here. The category also included votes from hospital patients and prison inmates.
 
In that category, 45 percent of votes were cast for the main Kurdish slate of candidates and a combined total of only 7 percent for the three main Sunni political parties. The main Shiite political alliance received 30 percent of the votes.
 
The heavily disproportionate number of votes for the Kurds and the slight showing for the Sunnis were primarily a reflection of their relative numbers in the security forces, the election officials said.
 
By contrast, while final election results will not be available for a week, Iraqi press reports have estimated that Kurds and Sunnis each received about 20 percent of the overall national vote for seats in the Parliament - roughly in line with Iraq's ethnic makeup. The main Shiite political alliance is expected to take a bit less than 50 percent of the seats in Parliament.
 
A spokesman for the U.S. military command responsible for training the Iraqi Army said he believes the number of Sunnis in the Iraqi military was higher than the special vote suggested.
 
The spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Fred Wellman, said that some soldiers voted near their homes on Dec. 15 and that their votes would not be included in the special tally.
 
Wellman said he did not have detailed estimates of the ethnic composition of the Iraqi military, though he said Sunni representation "clearly lags." He also emphasized the efforts being made to recruit Sunni soldiers, including more than 4,000 signed up in the past six months.
 
In addition to the military, prison and hospital vote tallies, the independent election commission released separate figures showing that Iraqis living abroad voted evenly for the main Kurdish and Shiite coalitions, with each receiving 30 percent of the overseas vote.
 
The figures reflected the high number of expatriates who fled the ruthless regime of Saddam, whose government and military were dominated by and favored Sunni.
 
The slate of candidates backed by Ayad Allawi, a former prime minister and a secular Shiite, received 12 percent.