Last week UN officials promised the names would be published in Iraqi newspapers before the vote, but that has yet to happen.

Some of the parties are using photographs on their posters of people who are not running. One poster shows the face of Abdul Karim Qasim, who became prime minister after a revolt against the monarchy in 1958 and was executed five years later. Another shows the face of Shaba'ad, one of the Sumerian queens of the ancient city of Ur. Many others show the face of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's leading Shia cleric, who is not only not standing for election but who also supposedly advocates the separation of religion and politics.

Politicians are not alone in distributing propaganda leaflets. Yesterday insurgents walked though a district of eastern Baghdad handing out their own election leaflets. They carried a warning: "Those who dare to stand in the lines of death to participate in the elections will be responsible for the consequences that will be heavy."

With mounting security concerns, the locations of many of the 5,000 polling centres across Iraq have not been announced. When the buildings have been identified - usually schools which are now empty for the holidays - they have promptly been shelled or mortared by insurgents. Three schools in the otherwise quiet city of Basra in the south were destroyed last week in a mortar attack. It is still unclear how and when voters will be told where to vote.

On election day motorists will be banned from the roads and a nationwide curfew will be imposed between 8pm and 6am. Voters must walk to polling centres, where they will find several security cordons ringing each station. They must then pass through the many security checks before they can finally enter the booth, unfold the vast ballot paper in front of them, choose one of the 111 parties contesting the election and tick the correct box.

Each party has been given a number and some have chosen their own symbols, ranging from date palms, to a lion's head, to a winged horse, to a military medal. But voters will still have to choose between parties with confusingly similar names such as the Iraqi Democratic Gathering, the Democratic Iraq Gathering, the Iraqi Gathering for Democracy, the Democratic Iraqi Current, and the Democratic Party of the Iraqi Nation.

A few have opted for simplicity, such as the prime minister Ayad Allawi's coalition, which is called the Iraqi list, or President Ghazi al-Yawar's alliance, named "Iraqis".

Violence means there are few election rallies and hardly any parties have announced their manifestos. The United Iraqi Alliance, the influential Shia coalition that is likely to come out best in the vote, is one of the few to have put forward its policies, which include insisting on a timetable for a US military withdrawal. Mr Allawi announced his policy agenda on Monday, just six days before the vote, and promised to create thousands of new jobs.

Many other groups bear little resemblance to Western parties and simply propose to work for a united, independent and democratic Iraq.

"Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. That's been our mantra here," said Carlos Valenzuela, the Colombian diplomat heading the UN election team and an election expert who has helped run polls in 14 other countries facing severe security challenges, including East Timor, Cambodia and South Africa. "Security in transitional elections is never good, never ideal."