Wave of attacks mars Iraqi parliamentary polls (Roundup)

Mar 7, 2010, 15:16 GMT

Baghdad - A wave of attacks battered Iraq as millions of voters went to the polls Sunday for a parliamentary election seen as a key test of Iraq's stability ahead of US troops' withdrawal next year.

Despite attacks, monitors said there had been heavy turnout in polls that Iraq's electoral commission expected could see 18.9 million votes cast by Iraq's Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and myriad ethnic and religious minority populations.

Nearly 6,300 candidates from 165 parties in 12 coalitions are competing for 325 seats in parliament, making it the largest parliamentary election in Iraq's history.

'The atmosphere here is feverish. You could actually sense the electricity in the air, even though there's no electricity in our houses,' Lubna Naji, a 23-year-old medical student, told the German Press Agency dpa.

Despite the violence and the heavy security - authorities have said more than 500,000 police and soldiers would be deployed across the country - voting in Naji's central Baghdad poll station was like a 'large neighbourhood reunion ... with smiling faces everywhere,' she said, despite the heavy security outside the school.

Naji said she couldn't find her name on the registration lists, but that she had wanted to vote for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, because he had 'contributed to the improvement in security,' and because 'his approach was nationalist, not sectarian.'

Elsewhere, the scene was more gruesome. At least 22 people were killed and 49 injured in at least 11 bomb and rocket attacks on polling stations across Baghdad alone, police said. At least 12 of those deaths occurred when a bomb flattened a building housing a polling station in the capital.

In the northern city of Mosul, one of Iraq's most dangerous, police told dpa that five polling stations had been closed after mortar rounds landed on one of them, injuring six observers.

Police said a bomb near another voting station in Mosul injured 10 people and that local politician Qusai al-Shobki and eight of his companions had been shot and injured as they approached a security checkpoint in al-Hamdaniya, some 30 kilometres east of Mosul.

Voter turnout had been 'strong' in the city, 'but then started to fall off after the attacks,' Jassim Mohammed, spokesman for Iraq's electoral commission in Mosul, told dpa.

Sahar Salah, a 40-year-old schoolteacher from Mosul, told dpa she had been on her way to vote, but then she heard the explosions and turned around to lock herself in the house.

A 60-year-old retiree who gave her name as Umm Salman said she had resolved not to vote but did so only out of fear that officials would vote on her behalf if she did fill in her ballot.

'Not one of these candidates deserves to be nominated,' she told dpa. 'They are all either incompetent, dishonest, collaborators, racists, or sectarian partisans.'

'But what shall I do? I am afraid my vote will go to the worst of this lot, since the officials at the voting centres cast votes on behalf of voters who don't show up,' she said.

Prominent Sunni lawmaker Saleh al-Mutlaq, whose party had briefly said it would boycott the polls after he was included on a list of hundreds of candidates banned from standing for their past ties to the outlawed Baath Party, called on Iraqis to take part in the polls.

'I call on all Iraqis to vote in the next three hours and fill all the ballots, so they will not be forged,' he told al-Sharqiya television as voting was still going on.

'Go, without reluctance,' he said. 'The time of change is coming. Beware of fraud.'

In at least one case, a security officer was removed from his post for intimidating voters. A spokesman for security forces in Shirqat told dpa that Major General Salah al-Din Mohammed had fired Riyad al- Asadi, a senior officer responsible for maintaining security at polls in the area, not far from Tikrit.

'The expulsion came after al-Asadi prevented people from voting unless they voted for al-Maliki's list,' the spokesman said.

Voting passed without any serious violence in the disputed city of Kirkuk, which many Iraqi Kurds hope to make the capital of a future independent state but which Iraqi Arab politicians and their allies from the area's Turkman minority view as an integral part of Iraq.

The vote split even family lines in this polarised city. Sawsan Saadoun told dpa she had voted for the Turkman Alliance's candidate. Her husband, Hashim Salih, said he had voted for former prime minister Ayad Allaw's Iraqi List.

'We are hear today to speak out against the injustice that has been done to us and to the Arabs,' Shukria Moustafa, a 45-year-old Turkman teacher from Kirkuk, told dpa.

Shirzad al-Taqani, 31, said he and his family had come from Arbil, in northern Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region, to vote for the Kurdish Alliance.

'My family is carrying the Kurdish flag because we feel that our votes will help guarantee the unification of Kirkuk with Kurdistan,' he told dpa.