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Insurgents killed about two dozen on election day { January 30 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48454-2005Jan30.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48454-2005Jan30.html
Historic Vote Concludes in Iraq Amid Attacks
By Karl Vick, Cameron W. Barr and Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 30, 2005; 10:03 AM
BAGHDAD, Jan. 30 -- Iraqis voted in their first democratic election in nearly half a century Sunday with many observers saying the day appeared to have yielded higher turnout than expected and less violence than feared.
Insurgents killed about two dozen people, including a U.S. Marine. But the level of mayhem by forces striving to disrupt the process was less than predicted, especially in Baghdad where turnout surged during the day amid signs of enthusiasm for voting even in some Sunni areas.
As expected, turnout appeared to be very uneven around the couuntry, with the majority Shiite community and Kurdish areas participating in the election to a much greater degree than the minority Sunnis. Voting continued in early evening in some places even after polls officially were to have closed.
Carlos Valenzuela, the United Nations' chief election adviser in Iraq, told CNN that he believed that overall turnout was considerably "better than expected."
That assessment was echoed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who said, "Every indication is that the election in Iraq is going better than expected." Rice conceded, however, speaking on ABC's "This Week, that "it's not a perfect election" and added, "there are going to be many, many difficult days ahead."
Final results will not be known for seven to 10 days, but a preliminary tally could come as early as late Sunday. The vote was to choose a national assembly to help govern Iraq temporarily and write a permanent constitution.
Iraqi election officials said that most of the country's 5,500 polling stations managed to get open and stay open often under the heaviest security ever provided for any election day anywhere. There were lines and scenes of celebration in the most heavily involved Shiite districts around Baghdad even as explosions reverberated across the city.
Officials acknowledged that some stations opened late or were deserted, particularly in areas of frequent insurgent attacks dominated by Sunni Muslims such as Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra, west and north of Baghdad.
And in some restive cities where the polls were operating, the voters were not.
At one polling place in southeast Mosul, for example, the only voters by late in the day were 15 Iraqi security forces assigned to keep the peace.
The country's electoral commission, in a claim that could not be verified, said at a news conference that between 65 and 72 percent of the country's eligible voters had turned out as of 2 p.m. (6 a.m. EST.) The commission claimed that turnout in Shiite areas was 90 percent.
Adil Allami, chief electoral officer of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, was exultant. "Freedom has won," he said. "We have conquered terrorism."
While the figures were unauthenticated, the basic pattern was not a surprise. Sunni extremists, fearing victory and ultimate control by the country's majority Shiite population, had called for a boycott, claiming no vote held under U.S. military occupation is legitimate.
Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, looking relaxed in a navy blue blazer and white pants, beamed as he cast his vote at a polling station in the U.S.-protected Green Zone at 9:40 a.m. Baghdad time (1:40 a.m. EST). "It felt "great," he said afterward. "It's history in the making."
"Iraqis have proved today that the strength of their votes is more powerful than the effects of bullets or terrorists," said Ibrahim Jafari, an interim vice president and the head of the religiously conservative Dawa Party. He said the vote he cast Sunday was the first in his life.
"This day represents a birthday for the Iraqi people and a birthday for the political process," he said.
The night before the historic day ended ominously with a rocket attack on the U.S. Embassy that killed two Americans and wounded five. The military announced Sunday morning that seven insurgents had been captured by troops about an hour after the attack. They were seen fleeing the scene of the rocket launch and tracked to a residence in southeastern Baghdad, the military said.
The success and timing of the embassy rocket attack, after almost two years in which mortar shells fired at the embassy and other targets in the six-square-mile Green Zone fell largely at random and seldom inflicted major damage or casualties, underscored the potential threat posed by insurgents who for months threatened to disrupt Sunday's poll.
The threat materialized but not to the extent many had feared. In the violent climate of post-invasion Iraq, there was nothing startling about the number of known attacks or the number of dead as of late Sunday afternoon.
A suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt in late morning at a polling station in the Zayuna neighborhood, in Baghdad's eastern side. Police officials told The Washington Post the blast killed five people and wounded seven. The upper middle class neighborhood is a mix of Sunni and Shia Muslims.
Another suicide car bomb killed an Iraqi policeman who challenged the vehicle as it approached a polling station in Western Baghdad.
A total of six people died in other suicide bombings at or near polling stations in Baghdad, police told the Associated Press. Five more were killed in mortar attacks in the capital. In Khan al-Mahawil, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, a policeman was killed in a mortar attack on a polling place.
Later a suicide bomber blew himself up near the home of Iraq's justice minister. Mortar attacks at scattered locations across Iraq reported by wire services accounted for the rest of the deaths. By wire service estimates, more than 50 people were injured.
"We have been waiting for this moment for a month," said Malik Adan Hamid, 26, a polling worker at the Fine Arts Institute in Baghdad's Mansour district. "There is no fear at all. We were trained for this."
At the Fine Arts Institute, about 40 people, some with children, gathered at the polling station soon after it opened. About 20 policemen patrolled outside, manning checkpoints at the end of the street and near the station itself. Blasts could be heard in the distance, but the mood was festive.
"We wanted to be the first to vote here," said Amir Mahmoud Jawad, an 18-year-old high school student. "This is our country, we have to do it. There should be no excuse for anyone not to come. These elections will decide the destiny of the country."
"The most important thing is that fear has no place in our hearts any more," said Samir Sabih, 37, a businessman at a polling center in Baghdad's largely Shiite Karrada neighborhood, where hundreds waited to vote. "This is the first time in my life I go to a polling center freely."
The turnout appeared to follow predicted lines: High in the country's Shiite Muslim south and Kurdish north, where populations disenfranchised by the government of Saddam Hussein embraced the opportunity to gain power in Baghdad -- and low in areas dominated by the Sunni Arabs where the insurgency has been centered.
In at least two cities in the Sunni Triangle polling stations were staffed by Iraqi soldiers and police. In at least one other, polls had not opened two hours after the official 7 a.m. start time.
"I came here today because I'm not frightened by any attack on us," said Mohammed Jaffar Ali Saadi, 43, in a crowd of several dozen people looking to vote at the Beirut School in Baqubah, the city northeast of Baghdad where poll workers stayed away. "I came here to vote and to give my support to whoever deserves it."
In Najaf, the Shiite holy city that embodies Shiite Muslim hopes for the elections, a light early turnout meant several dozen people at one station in the first hour. Among the first out was Najaha Hassan Rahadi, 58, who broke into tears when asked why she was voting.
"Six of my brothers were executed, and I spent two years in jail" under Saddam Hussein, she said from her wheelchair. "I want to elect a government that represents me."
In Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, Iraqi National Guard assumed the role of election workers inside one school, as more than 100 U.S. forces took up positions outside. Loudspeakers mounted on Humvees urged people to come and vote, but the streets were empty of all but soldiers.
No U.S. forces were seen in Tikrit, Hussein's home town. But resignations among poll workers forced those remaining to press police officers into finishing last-minute preparations that delayed the opening for about an hour. No voters were waiting, however.
In Mosul, the country's third largest city where insurgents have challenged U.S. and Iraqi forces for more than two months, the streets were also empty of all but police.
"I will not vote because the price might be my life," said Khalid Muhammed, 35, an accountant out looking to see if anyone else was taking the risk. Explosions were reported across the city.
By midmorning, Iraq's largely Shiite south appeared to be largely quiet, except for reports of a series of explosions in Basra, the country's second largest city. In Basra, 33 people voted in the first 30 minutes after one city center poll opened. "We came early because we couldn't wait," said Abdul-Hamid Sayab, who arrived with daughter Azal, 21, and voted for the Iraqi Communist Party. "This is a historic event, that we vote freely for the first time in decades."
In Kirkuk, the ethnically diverse, oil-rich northern city coveted by ethnic Kurds as the possible capital of an independent state, security was high and so was turnout. More than 200 voters showed up in the first hour at a neighborhood populated by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. "I came today because we are here," said Kafya Nawzad, 62, a Kurd. "We exist in Kirkuk. Despite the explosions in Kirkuk this morning, I came to vote."
From a ballot that lists 111 parties, coalitions and individuals, voters will elect a 275-member transitional parliament that will serve for one year, produce a new executive and, most crucially, oversee the drafting of a constitution. A separate ballot lists candidates for councils in Iraq's 18 governorates, or provinces. In addition, ethnic Kurds in three northeastern provinces will choose a regional assembly that embodies the Kurdish desire for continued autonomy from Arab Iraq.
But in a six-week campaign dominated by stark fears of insurgent attacks -- almost none of the 7,700 candidates for the National Assembly campaigned publicly or even announced their names -- the key issue remained turnout, and its implications for the credibility of any government it produced.
Officials had expected Iraqis to give polling places a wide berth in the morning hours, when attacks most often occur in Iraq and when insurgents likely would try to make an impression that would suppress turnout for the rest of the day. But a senior U.S. diplomat, speaking from the stricken embassy, said several factors, including the apparent disorganization of recent attacks, gave him hope that election day would be less violent than predicted.
"I have a certain faith in the human spirit," he said. "If we get through the morning, I think there's a very good chance it'll snowball and turnout will be much higher than anyone expects."
Such an outcome would be a major accomplishment for the deeply troubled American project here. After the U.S.-led invasion toppled Hussein in April 2003, Iraq was stripped of much of its government infrastructure by looters, and was then plunged into chaos by an insurgency that has killed more than 1,400 U.S. troops, more than 10,000 Iraqis and turned car bombings from exceptional events into tactical attacks that occur at the pace of a half-dozen each day.
"It goes to the heart of the issue," said the diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly. "If Iraqis don't want to stand up and fight for what is right for their country, we can't do it for them.
"But if they do, and they come out, then all the naysayers ought to think a little bit about whether we ought to go home, or if we ought to stay and support that."
Immediately after the rocket attack on the embassy, debris lay on the floor of the contracting office and the room was filled with a dusty haze, according to an embassy official who reached the scene minutes after the attack. In the sudden quiet that followed the explosion, embassy and military personnel began calling for medics and looking for the injured.
The official, who would not be identified by name because he is not authorized to speak publicly, said he saw an American soldier standing over a woman who lay on the floor. "She looked pretty beaten up," the official said.
"She's dead," the soldier calmly announced.
The fatal strike brought a somber close to what one U.S. military official, speaking as dusk gathered in the tense capital, had termed "a fairly good day." At the time, no U.S. forces had been reported killed; moments later, though, a roadside bomb in Baghdad killed an American soldier.
On Saturday, insurgent attacks killed at least 16 Iraqis, including nine slain by a suicide bomber in Khanaqin, Iraqi police Capt. Ahmed Nouri said. Three civilians were killed by a roadside bomb in Samarra and three soldiers by a rocket attack on a military base, the Reuters news agency reported.
In the suicide attack in Khanaqin, a Kurdish-controlled city northeast of Baghdad near the Iranian border, a man blew himself up near a joint Iraqi-American military post with an explosive vest, a device seldom used in Iraq but one that authorities fear could be employed at polling stations.
The insurgent group calling itself Al Qaeda in Iraq asserted responsibility for the attack in an Internet posting.
In the capital, security around the Green Zone on Saturday was extraordinary even by Baghdad standards, giving the city the air of a combat zone. No vehicles were allowed within three blocks of the only public entrance to the fortified complex, protected by tanks at both approaches. Iraqi police cars, before being allowed to proceed to their precinct house, formed a line to be searched by barrel-chested American security contractors and bomb-sniffing dogs.
In a striking scene outside the main checkpoint, American soldiers marched several dozen Iraqi men single-file down the center of the street, like prisoners of war. Each had been frisked and had a decal of the Iraqi flag pasted on his coat. "Election officials," explained the soldier bringing up rear.
The massive security reflects the importance attached to an election that is expected to give Shiite Muslims -- estimated to account for 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people -- a share of power proportionate with their numbers for the first time. High turnout was predicted in southern Iraq and other areas heavily populated by Shiites, who have been largely dispossessed since their boycott of a 1920 election and brutally persecuted by Hussein's Baath Party government.
"The election returns to us our legitimate rights," said Aquil Sudani, 26, stationed outside a Shiite mosque in Baghdad on Saturday, handing out campaign literature for the United Iraqi Alliance. Dubbed "the Shiite list" because it was assembled with the blessing of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most senior Shiite religious leader in Iraq, the alliance entered the six-week campaign as a heavy favorite.
"We are here to say to the world, 'By God, even if they sever our hands and legs, we shall crawl to the ballot booths to fulfill the pledge," thundered Jalaledin Saghir during Friday prayers at a Baghdad mosque favored by followers of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose clerical leader is listed first on the United Iraqi Alliance slate.
Sistani's portrait dominated the coalition's campaign posters, and mosques issued directions to polling stations. In recent days, however, the Shiite slate has appeared to back away from its overtly religious appeal, producing posters that feature not an ayatollah but a woman with luxurious brown hair.
"Where did that come from?" a senior British diplomat said. "That may mean the religious motif wasn't going over that well."
Staff writer Jackie Spinner in Irbil, correspondents Doug Struck in Najaf and Anthony Shadid in Baghdad, and special correspondents Omar Fekeiki, Bassam Sebti, Naseer Nouri, Khalid Saffar and Sahar Nageeb in Baghdad, Salih Saif Aldin in Tikrit, Dlovan Brwari in Mosul, Hasan Shammeri in Baquba, Emad Zeinal in Basra and Marwan Anie in Kirkuk contributed to this report. Staff Writer Fred Barbash contributed from Washington.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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