Iraqis Vote Amid Tight Security and Scattered Attacks
"Iraqis began casting ballots Sunday morning in the country's first free elections in more than 50 years, and scattered insurgent attacks began soon after, including a car bombing that killed at least one police officer in western Baghdad.
Polling places began opening in the capital at 7 a.m., and security by Iraqi and American forces was very tight, with vehicles turned away from checkpoints and only foot traffic allowed in most of the city.
Fears of attacks to intimidate voters were ratcheted up Saturday morning, when a rocket attack on the American Embassy killed two Americans and wounded five. One of the dead was a civilian and the other was military, embassy officials said.
On Sunday, the Iraqi police told The Associated Press that a suicide bomb attack in western Baghdad killed one policeman and wounded several people at a security checkpoint.
Several explosions broke out across Baghdad on Sunday morning, especially in the southwestern section of the city. American attack helicopters circled over the city center, and the roar of fighter jets could be heard from high above.
Still, two hours after polls opened, voters appeared to be turning out in large numbers in the capital.
At the Arabiya school in the Karada district of central Baghdad, plastic ballot boxes already had scores of large, folded ballots stacked inside just an hour after voting began.
Qasim Muhammad Saleh, 45, walking with his two sons, Sajad, 5, and Jowid, 12, had just come from voting at Lebanon High School. The boys were carrying Iraqi flags, and Mr. Saleh's right index finger carried the ink marks showing he had cast his ballot.
''We now have our freedom,'' he said. ''After 35 years, we finally got rid of Saddam and now we can vote for whoever we want.
''After casting my ballots, I'm hoping that the situation will improve.''
Nearby, at the Nawfal primary school in Karada, there was a steady stream of people lining up to go through the barbed wire checkpoint in order to vote. Inside, people were shrugging off the sounds of explosions, and the mood was upbeat, even enthusiastic, as they went through the voting process.
Voters appeared to be turning out in large numbers in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, especially in Sulaimaniya, where attacks have been muted, news services reported.
In Mosul, where American forces have fought frequent insurgent attacks, Iraqi election officials said that polling stations had opened on time and that at some there was a large turnout and requests for more ballots.
Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the commander in the area, said about an hour and a half after the polls opened that there were reports of mortar attacks and small arms fire around Mosul. The general also said there appeared to be a good turnout in the northwest section of the city, surprising because it is a mostly Sunni area.
In Baquba, a center of the Sunni Arab insurgency, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, no voters could be seen more than an hour after polls opened, CNN reported. In several polling places, no election workers came at all.
Iraqi officials predicted that 8 million of the country's 14 million eligible voters would cast ballots, which would be a turnout of roughly 57 percent. But with insurgents threatening to kill Iraqis who vote and to bomb polling places, and with most leaders of the country's Sunni minority calling for a boycott, that statement, by the Independent Election Commission of Iraq, appeared to be as much an expression of hope as it was a prediction.
The election will create the basis here for the rise to power of a Shiite-dominated government for the first time in the country's 85-year history. But the chaotic situation on the ground seemed to render most predictions about the future composition of the government tenuous at best.
The turnout, and the ease with which the election is carried off, are regarded as major tests of the Bush administration's goal of planting a democratic government in the heart of the Middle East, and for its hopes to stabilize this country and eventually bring 155,000 American troops home. Mr. Bush, in his weekly radio address on Saturday, said he expected the insurgents to do everything possible to thwart the voting because free elections would ''expose the emptiness of their vision for Iraq.''
The election is one of a number of landmarks intended by Iraqi leaders and American officials to set up a democratic state here, following the destruction of Saddam Hussein's government in the spring of 2003. Iraqi voters will elect a 275-member national assembly, which will be empowered to write the country's permanent constitution. After that task, to be completed in the autumn, voters will choose a full-term national assembly in December.
Iraqi voters will also be selecting provincial parliaments, and the Kurds in the north will be voting for candidates to the regional government there that was set up after the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
With soldiers and the police swarming the streets, the country was relatively quiet for most of Saturday. A suicide bomber killed eight people, including a child, in an attack on a police building in the town of Khanaqin, near the Iranian border. A gun battle broke out between Iraqi troops and insurgents on Haifa Street, one of the most dangerous thoroughfares in central Baghdad. Insurgents attacked at least seven polling places, from Dohuk in the north to Basra in the south.
The country's leaders, most of whom, like Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, are candidates for office, were uncharacteristically quiet, issuing few last-minute appeals to the Iraqis to go to the polls. That chore was left to the Independent Iraqi Election Commission, whose thousands of workers have been active since last fall to prepare.
''Everything is ready, the security is in place, and all the materials have been taken to the voting centers,'' said Fareed Ayar, an official with the election commission. ''We are now asking the Iraqi people to vote.''
Iraqi Shiites are expected to turn out in great numbers, spurred in part by a proclamation from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite leader, declaring it the religious duty of every Iraqi Shiite to vote. Many of the followers of Moktada al-Sadr, a young cleric at odds with the religious establishment, appeared ready to stay home.
The enthusiasm among Shiites has its mirror opposite in Iraq's Sunni Arab minority, most of whose leaders have called for boycott of the election. In Anbar, Nineveh and Salahuddin provinces, where Sunni Arabs are the majority and where fighting with American forces is continuous, Iraqis predicted that the combination of intimidation and apathy would keep most voters away from the polls.
The prospect of a widespread boycott by Sunnis and others raises the possibility that the results of the election will be viewed as illegitimate. Some Iraqis have said that in that case, the election could push the country toward a full-scale civil war.
There were ominous signs that large attacks could still come on Election Day and afterward. The police in Baghdad reported that 11 police cars had been stolen in the past 10 days, raising the possibility that insurgents could stage attacks on polling places as they have promised using one of the few types of cars that will be permitted to move freely on the streets. Masked men have been spotted carrying away police flak jackets from the scenes of car bombings recently, and security agencies were warning journalists and others to be on the lookout for fake checkpoints that are manned by insurgents in disguise.
For all the thousands of soldiers and police officers on the streets, the security around many polling places appeared inadequate and improvised. Many of the barricades consisted of little more than a string of bricks, tin cans and cardboard boxes.
The uncertain turnout of Iraqi voters seemed the most vexing, as well as the most important, question hanging over the election. The voting follows an unusually truncated period of campaigning, in which many of the country's 7,400-plus political candidates were too frightened to venture into public or even to identify themselves, particularly in the northern and central parts of the country where the insurgency is strongest.
Insurgents killed candidates. They passed out leaflets saying they would ''wash the streets with the blood of voters.'' Many voters said they would go to the polls having little idea whom they are voting for.
Under such circumstances, trying to predict voter turnout, or even gauge interest in the democratic process, seemed futile. But by and large, enthusiasm, or the lack of it, seemed to track ethnic and sectarian lines.
In the largely Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, for instance, many Iraqis, particularly followers of Ayatollah Sistani, said they would brave bombs and gunfire to cast a ballot.
''I voted under Saddam -- it was bogus -- and now I am ready for a real election,'' said Mohsin Abdul Ruda, a 50-year-old shopkeeper, who lives down the street from a girls' school that will serve as his neighborhood's polling place. ''Everyone in the neighborhood is going to vote.''
Mr. Ruda said he planned to vote for the United Iraq Alliance, the coalition of mostly Shiite parties brought together by Ayatollah Sistani.
As he spoke, three loud explosions echoed nearby.
''There is no fear,'' Mr. Ruda said, waving his hand. ''Only cowards will be afraid to vote.''
THE IRAQI ELECTION: THE ELECTION"