Baghdad, Iraq ? A bomb targeting a prominent Shiite cleric killed seven people outside one of southern Iraq’s holiest shrines Wednesday as campaigning began for Iraq’s first post-Saddam elections — a vote that is going ahead despite attacks and assassinations by Sunni insurgents.

The attack in the heartland of Iraqi’s majority Shiite population wounded the cleric, Sheik Abdul Mahdi al-Karbalayee, and was a stark reminder of the risks for the six-week campaign leading to a Jan. 30 vote for a 275-member National Assembly.

The campaigning began as a government official said Saddam Hussein’s notorious right-hand man, Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali,” would be the first among 12 former regime members to appear at an initial investigative court hearing next week to face charges for crimes allegedly committed during Saddam’s 35-year dictatorship.

On the final day of candidate registration, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and Washington favorite, announced his 240-member list of candidates, pitting him against the slate embraced by Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. About 90 parties and political movements have applied to be represented on ballots.

Heading the al-Sistani-backed United Iraqi Alliance list is Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the pro-Iranian Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution and chief of its armed wing, the Iran-based Badr Brigade, during Saddam’s rule.

With the threatened Sunni boycott, the lists submitted make Allawi and al-Hakim the leading contenders to take top jobs in Iraq’s next government.

A man puts up a closeup photograph of Iraq's interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi as a background to a media conference in Baghdad. Allawi joined the race for Iraq's Jan. 30 elections at a Wednesday news conference.

Shiites make up 60 percent of Iraq’s 26 million population and are expected to dominate the polls. Such an outcome worries some secular Shiites here, along with neighboring Sunni-dominated countries and the United States, who are wary of a Shiite-run Iraq growing closer to its eastern neighbor, Iran.

“Iran will not be indifferent to Iraq’s future, and it cannot ignore the country because any developments there would have an impact on the internal affairs of Iran,” Hasan Kazemi Qomi, Iran’s top diplomat in Baghdad, told his country’s official Islamic Republic News Agency.