Iraqi voters defy election day violence
Updated on 07 March 2010
Seven years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis hoped their long-promised democratic new dawn had arrived. But 38 people have been killed in polling day attacks as Jonathan Miller reports.
Al-Qaida had threatened that voters would incur Allah's wrath and it was not long before Baghdad TV crews were racing towards the first pall of smoke.
Mortar rounds, rockets and roadside bombs exploded near polling stations in and around Baghdad, in what was a calculated attack on Iraq's fragile democracy.
But Iraqis have defied the bullets and chosen instead ballot papers, voting in their droves in the country's second full-term parliament since the US-led invasion in 2003.
The country's president Jalal Talabani told reporters: "I addressed all the Iraqi people and urged them to actively and largely participate in this decisive election, which will define the destiny of democracy in Iraqi."
US President Obama and foreign secretary, David Miliband, have congratulated the Iraqi people for taking part in the elections.
Iraqi military spokesman Major General Qassim Ata said: "The insurgents have tried since early morning to disrupt the citizens going to the ballots.
"What happened was the complete opposite. Millions of people went to the polling stations and the number of voters has increased."
Jane Arraf, who is in Baghdad for the Christian Science Monitor, told Channel 4 News: "Just from going to the polls and from taking the pulse at polling centres across the country, the turnout seems to have been very high in some cities.
"Some even went to the polls in the midst of explosions."
In the deadliest of the attacks, dynamite was used to blow up a Baghdad apartment block. Iraq's interior ministry confirmed the blast killed 25 people. Four people were killed in a similar explosion at another residential building.
Baghdad's security spokesman, Major General Qassim al-Moussawi, said most of the rockets and mortar bombs had been fired from mainly Sunni districts around Baghdad.
He said: "We and the people will not give in to such threats."
And despite the violence, he confirmed a car ban aimed at foiling vehicle bombs had been lifted after less than four hours of voting.
There is no clear picture of turnout numbers yet. But by the day's end, Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission said that only two of 8,000 polling stations had to be shut, and only briefly, for security reasons.
Around 6,200 candidates from 86 factions are vying for 325 parliamentary seats.
Iraq's political course will be decisive for President Barack Obama's plans to halve US troop levels over the next five months and withdraw entirely by the end of 2011.
