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Iraqis vote behind barbed wire, testing security
Sat Jan 31, 2009 1:58am EST
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By Khalid al-Ansary
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqis voted behind barbed wire and rings of police on Saturday in an election that tested the war-battered country's fragile security gains and which may ease lingering sectarian resentment still fuelling violence.
Iraq's first election since 2005 will pick local councils in 14 of its 18 provinces and show whether Iraqi forces are capable of maintaining peace as U.S. troops begin to pull back, almost six years after the invasion to unseat Saddam Hussein.
Three mortar shells landed on Saturday close to voting centers in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, but no one was hurt.
The last election took place amid an al Qaeda-inspired Sunni insurgency and was followed by a wave of sectarian slaughter between Iraq's once dominant Sunni Arabs and its majority Shi'ite Muslims.
A relatively peaceful and credible election will show Iraq has moved on from solving disputes with bullets, and will set the stage for a parliamentary vote late in the year, in which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will seek to renew his mandate.
Maliki is challenging dominant Shi'ite rivals in the south, tribal sheikhs who fought al Qaeda are taking on Sunni religious parties in the west, and Arabs in the north who boycotted the last vote are looking to win a share of power from Kurds there.
"My suffering has pushed me to vote," said electoral worker Asad Wahayab in the southern oil city of Basra, who added that after the election he would go back to being unemployed. "We have suffered a lot and this is our chance to vote for change."
Just under 15 million of Iraq's 28 million people are registered to vote for provincial councils that select powerful regional governors. Three Kurdish provinces are to vote separately and the election in oil-rich, disputed Kirkuk has been put off because no one could agree on election rules.
Around 14,400 candidates are competing for 440 council seats in exuberant campaigning that has been made possible by a sharp drop in violence over the past 18 months.
Layers of campaign posters decorate the blast walls that divide Iraqi neighborhoods, and balloons bearing political messages compete in the skies with airships used by U.S. forces to spot mortar or rocket attacks by militants.
RINGS OF SECURITY
Voting stations, enveloped in rings of tight security to deter suicide bomb attacks by insurgents, opened at 7 a.m. (0400 GMT) and were due to close again at 5 p.m. (1400 GMT).
Thousands of Iraqi police and troops guarded the polling centers. Cars were banned from cities to counter car bombs, airports and borders were shut and voters were being frisked for explosives-laden suicide vests and scanned for bomb residue.
"It's my first time voting and I am really excited. I hope whoever wins paves this road," said Jamil Kirtohamo, 19, an ethnic Yazidi, as he stood next to a pot hole in a dirt road in a windy desert town near the Syrian border. Police snipers crouched on the roof of a school that housed a voting center.
In Baghdad's giant Sadr City slum, the scene of bloody street fighting last year between black masked Shi'ite militia and government and U.S. forces, 84-year-old housewife Fatima Lafta said her husband had told her who to vote for. Continued...
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