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Snipers and sandbags - Iraq votes
Even by Iraq's standards of violence the town of Tal Afar has a hideous reputation. Not just among its dwindling, weary population but among the American troops who arrived here to snuff out a sustained and ferocious insurgency.
For two years this scrubland town of 150,000 and falling, near the Syrian border, has experienced its own terrifying war. Hundreds have died in battles; others have been beheaded, executed, shot. Its police have fled, some of its people have turned up in mass graves.
"Tal Afar is a little bit Mad Max," was how one spokesman for the US-led coalition characterised it to the Guardian.
Yesterday, the day of Iraq's first full-term parliamentary elections, there was, however, an unusual sight on Tal Afar's streets: queues of Sunni Muslims waiting to vote. At the Zahawi school - known to the US third armoured cavalry regiment as bravo one four - they stood for up to four hours to make their mark, broken up into groups of about a dozen, leaving gaps, to make the crowd a less tempting target for suicide bombers.
The half-mile line waited patiently by the school's walls, which remain covered with hundreds of bullet holes - evidence of a fierce fight four months previously between a dogged resistance and US troops. Two holes made by a couple of US Hellfire missiles had been freshly plastered over.
One of the first to vote was Saadal al-Lah. Like almost every other male in the town the 37-year-old unemployed clerk expressed no appreciation that the US occupation was allowing him to vote. Indeed, like every other Sunni voter interviewed here, he wanted the US to leave Tal Afar and Iraq. "In Saddam's time, it was safer," he said. "You could walk and go anywhere."
Mr Lah said he fled the town temporarily in September when the US launched operation restoring rights to try to remove the insurgents. "I was scared of the Americans and the insurgents. They were shooting and we were in the middle," he said.
More
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1668772,00.html
"Tal Afar is a little bit Mad Max," was how one spokesman for the US-led coalition characterised it to the Guardian.
Yesterday, the day of Iraq's first full-term parliamentary elections, there was, however, an unusual sight on Tal Afar's streets: queues of Sunni Muslims waiting to vote. At the Zahawi school - known to the US third armoured cavalry regiment as bravo one four - they stood for up to four hours to make their mark, broken up into groups of about a dozen, leaving gaps, to make the crowd a less tempting target for suicide bombers.
The half-mile line waited patiently by the school's walls, which remain covered with hundreds of bullet holes - evidence of a fierce fight four months previously between a dogged resistance and US troops. Two holes made by a couple of US Hellfire missiles had been freshly plastered over.
One of the first to vote was Saadal al-Lah. Like almost every other male in the town the 37-year-old unemployed clerk expressed no appreciation that the US occupation was allowing him to vote. Indeed, like every other Sunni voter interviewed here, he wanted the US to leave Tal Afar and Iraq. "In Saddam's time, it was safer," he said. "You could walk and go anywhere."
Mr Lah said he fled the town temporarily in September when the US launched operation restoring rights to try to remove the insurgents. "I was scared of the Americans and the insurgents. They were shooting and we were in the middle," he said.
More
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1668772,00.html
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Iraqis went to the polls in large numbers yesterday to elect for the first time a parliament representing all communities. A loud explosion heralded the start of voting in Baghdad, but the level of violence was low.
In Sunni districts of the capital, which boycotted previous elections, there was a jubilant atmosphere as people queued at the polling stations.
Ahmed Fadhil, an engineer in the Sunni district of al-Jihad in west Baghdad, said: "I am very happy because it is the first time that we Sunni Arabs have voted in a democratic election." He was voting for the Sunni religious parties.
Most of the 15 million Iraqis eligible to vote seemed to be opting for religious or ethnic parties. In the solidly Shia district of Jadriyah, a shopkeeper, Saad Abbas, said he was voting for the United Iraqi Alliance, the clerical coalition. He said: "It represents the Iraqi people, our hopes of freedom after 35 years of Saddam Hussein's oppression.
With cars banned from the streets there was a placid atmosphere in and around the Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim school, one of the polling stations in Jadriyah. The political and religious sympathies of the neighbourhood are revealed by the name of the school, called after a Shia religious notable murdered by the old regime.
Voters have become used to dipping their fingers in purple indelible ink to prevent them voting twice. Talib Ibrahim Hussein, the headmaster of the school and in charge of the polling station, said he expected a 90 per cent turnout by the 2,600 eligible voters in his district. He was worried about running out of ballot boxes.
Only occasionally were there signs that the election was taking place in the most dangerous city in the world. A couple asked Mr Hussein if they could vote in Jadriyah, explaining that they had been recently forced out of the largely Sunni district of Dohra in south Baghdad by death threats because they were Shia. Mr Hussein agreed to let them vote.
More
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article333462.ece