BAGHDAD, Jan. 30 -- Polls opened early Sunday in Iraq as voting began in elections intended to produce the country's first freely chosen government in almost half a century.
Security was tight as voters waited to cast ballots a day after a rocket attack on the U.S. Embassy in the city killed two Americans and injured five. The attack was the deadliest on the heavily fortified embassy in the 22 months since the U.S. invasion.
U.S. troops in the Green Zone hang a banner that counsels people on how to respond to attack. The zone, housing the U.S. Embassy and Iraqi government offices, has come under frequent attack.
(Khalid Mohammed -- AP)
|
|
The rocket crashed through the ceiling of the embassy's Project and Contracting Office, which disburses reconstruction funds, shortly before 8 p.m. Saturday. Michelle Henry, a spokeswoman for the contracting office, said a civilian woman and a U.S. Navy officer were killed.
The success and timing of the 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 have threatened to disrupt Sunday's poll.
Final deliveries of more than 7 million pounds of ballot boxes, voting forms, cardboard booths and indelible purple ink to stain voters' fingers were made Saturday to about 5,000 polling sites across the country. It remained unclear, however, how many of Iraq's estimated 14 million eligible voters would turn out in the face of daily threats by insurgents to attack polling stations and to track down and kill those who take part in the elections.
"They should take part because this is the future in the making and people have to take their fate in their own hands," interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said in an interview with British television. "I ask them to participate in the elections whether they are inside or outside Iraq: Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Christians."
"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."
But half an hour after polls opened Sunday, ringed by Iraqi police and troops, only one local resident had voted. Laith Ali, 42, said he would be back later with his wife and mother.
"I don't know how to express this feeling because this is the first time I've done it," said Ali, a merchant.
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 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 may 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 President Saddam 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.
