The U.S. campaign quickened considerably Friday as commanders made final decisions on the location of polling sites. Throughout the pre-dawn hours, U.S. troops escorted members of the Iraqi Intervention Force, an elite military brigade, to polling sites, many of which were in elementary and secondary schools. The U.S. soldiers then helped deliver concrete barriers and coils of razor wire to secure the locations. Finally, soldiers from the new Iraqi army were escorted to the sites to assist with security.
In Mosul, a tour of six polling sites in the southeast quadrant revealed a broad spectrum of preparedness. At one elementary school, Iraqi security forces had laid out shiny new concertina wire at both ends of a courtyard and used it to line a path to the building where voting would occur. Inside, two rooms had been cleaned and equipped with cardboard voting booths, two pens to mark ballots already in place. Plastic ballot boxes and even new boxes of Kleenex had been neatly set on tables for election workers. Soldiers had set up machine-gun nests on top of the building and across the street.
A car burns after exploding in front of a school in southern Baghdad that was scheduled to be used as a polling place. Hours earlier in the same area, a car bomb detonated next to a police station, killing four Iraqi civilians.
(Ali Jasim -- Reuters)
|
|
At another school, Kurdish soldiers with the Iraqi Intervention Force and Arab soldiers with the Iraqi army were in separate buildings, feuding while election materials and concertina wire sat untouched. A lieutenant with the Iraqi Intervention Force complained to Lt. Col. Michael Gibler, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment of the Stryker Brigade Combat Team, which has operational responsibility over the area, that the Iraqi soldiers had refused to provide identification upon arrival at the site. Many of the soldiers are former members of the Iraqi National Guard, which was believed to have been infiltrated by the insurgents.
Gibler went next door and found the Iraqi army on-site commander, a captain, sitting inside a room with a few of his men, an onion roasting on a heater. When Gibler confronted him, the man attributed the problems to language barriers.
"The problem is they don't speak Arabic, they just speak in Kurdish," the man said through an interpreter.
Gibler encouraged them to work together.
At another school serving as a polling site, the exterior was covered with graffiti warning: "Anyone who votes will be beheaded."
A U.S. adviser at the site said the graffiti was already there when Iraqi security forces arrived Friday morning, suggesting that the insurgents had been tipped off that the school would be used as a polling site.
At another site, Iraqi security forces were stationed at the entrance to a school and on the perimeter. Iraqi and U.S. officers were still trying to iron out security procedures and were looking for a secure room in which to hold the vote.
Shortly after the Iraqi forces arrived, a group of insurgents shot off a quick burst of automatic weapons fire in their direction.
"It was, {grv}'Hey, welcome to the neighborhood. We know you're gonna be here,' '' said Lt. Noel Rodriguez, 23, a platoon leader with the 3-21 Battalion's Alpha Company, who was assisting at the site.
Correspondents Karl Vick and Anthony Shadid and special correspondents Omar Fekeiki and Salih Saif Aldin in Baghdadcontributed to this report.
