Millions of Iraqis Voted Despite Threat of Violence

(March 7) – Bombs and mortars thundered across Iraq and left at least 36 people dead Sunday as insurgents sought to sabotage historic elections deciding who will shepherd the nation into a new era once American troops pull out.

Despite the violence, millions of Iraqis streamed out of polling stations unabashedly waving purple-inked fingers -- an iconic image of resilient citizens plotting their future after so much bloodshed.

Polls have now closed in the country's second parliamentary elections since Saddam Hussein's ouster. The balloting is a key test of whether the current Shiite Muslim-led government can reach across the sectarian divide and win votes from the country's myriad factions, conquering fissures that have stymied Iraqi unity since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

American troops stopped patrolling Iraqi towns last summer, pulling back to gigantic U.S. military bases across Iraq. But some 96,000 troops remain – a force set to be cut in half by this summer, and disappear completely by 2011. Washington would like to leave behind a stable democracy – the initial goal of the American invasion that's eluded Iraq for the past seven years.


Violence spiked in the lead-up to Sunday's voting, which Sunni extremists see as validating the U.S. occupation and Shiites' grasp on power. The head of an al-Qaida-linked group, the Islamic State of Iraq, vowed to kill anyone who dared to vote. Iraqis who cast ballots risk "God's wrath and the mujahideen's weapons," the group threatened in a Web posting early Sunday.

Despite such threats, turnout appeared to be high, but concrete numbers won't be available for days on how many of Iraq's estimated 19 million eligible voters cast ballots. Mosque loudspeakers exhorted people in northwest Baghdad to use their ballots as "arrows to the enemy's chest." Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, casting his own vote, told a crowd of reporters that insurgent attacks "will not undermine the will of the Iraqi people."

Explosions wrecked at least two buildings in northern Baghdad, and across town insurgents lobbed grenades into a crowd of people lining up to vote. Barrages of mortars screamed across the capital's skies and into the so-called Green Zone, home to the U.S. Embassy and the Iraqi prime minister's office. An Interior Ministry official told The Associated Press that such attacks killed 35 people in Baghdad alone. A policeman also died south of the capital when a bomb exploded at a polling station he was guarding.

One of the Baghdad blasts hit near the sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City, and rescuers told AP they could hear women and children screaming for help from underneath debris. Workers were using cranes and tractors to try to reach them -- and possibly more bodies -- under rubble strewn with blankets and torn bits of clothing.

The country's borders and airports were closed, and Baghdad's security spokesman Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said about half a million Iraqi troops are "in a state of combat." "We are operating in a battlefield and our warriors are expecting the worst," he told reporters.

Outside the capital, two bombs exploded near a polling station in the western city of Fallujah, and mortar fire was also reported the northern city of Mosul and in Salahuddin province, home to Saddam's former village and grave site.

Salahuddin's governor, Mutather Alwan, anticipated high turnout in his mostly Sunni province. "The people here are looking to improve their situation," he told The Washington Post. "This government has done nothing for them, so we will turn out in numbers to restore our rights. People are now far more knowledgeable than they were in 2005 [at the time of the last parliamentary election]."

The U.S. Embassy's 26 observer teams had to briefly halt visits to polling stations across the country because of safety concerns. "They were all given the green light to resume before midday," spokesman Phil Frayne told the Post. "In general we're seeing a pretty good turnout."

Later the White House issued a statement from President Barack Obama expressing "great respect for the millions of Iraqis who refused to be deterred by acts of violence, and who exercised their right to vote."

"Their participation demonstrates that the Iraqi people have chosen to shape their future through the political process," Obama said.

The last time Iraqis went to the polls was in February 2009, to elect candidates for local offices. But Sunday's voting was only the second parliamentary election since Saddam's fall, and the first under full Iraqi sovereignty. American diplomats and soldiers were still assisting in the country's day-to-day business during the last parliamentary election in 2005.

The legitimacy of those polls was seriously marred by a Sunni boycott, which kept a huge number of skeptical Iraqis at home and awarded disproportionate power to Shiite candidates, whose followers turned out in large numbers. The result further fueled Sunni resentment of the Shiite-led government in which they had little say, and led in turn to more violence.

Observers are keen to gauge the Sunni turnout in this past weekend's polls. "I voted in 2005. There were a lot less people then," Ahmed Saad Chadian, a voter in the mostly Shiite city of Nasiriyah in the south, told the AP. "Today participation is much higher."

But another Iraqi explained why he didn't participate. "Because of the explosions and because there is no honorable man I can elect, I stayed at home," Ali Malek Hussein, who lives in eastern Baghdad, told The Washington Post.

While Iraq's post-Saddam years have been steeped in blood and ethnic turmoil, these elections are taking place against a backdrop of much-reduced violence. But hundreds of Iraqis are still dying in attacks each month, corruption is rampant and basic services like electricity and clean water are spotty. Such issues are on Iraqi voters' minds, they said, as they cast ballots.

"I am not scared and I am not going to stay put at home," Walid Abid, a 40-year-old father of two, told the AP. "We need to change things. If I stay home and not come to vote, [my neighborhood] Azamiyah will get worse."

More than 6,200 candidates are contesting 325 seats in Iraq's parliament. Al-Maliki's religious coalition faces stiff opposition from a former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, a fellow Shiite whose secular party has garnered crossover support from the country's Sunni Muslims as well.

Preliminary results won't be out for days, and ratification of official ones will take at least two weeks. Unless there's a landslide, the winning party will have to form a governing coalition and possibly pick a new prime minister in a process that could take months. Al-Maliki wasn't sworn in for five months after the 2005 election.