Insurgents bombed a polling station and lobbed grenades at voters yesterday, killing 26 people in attacks aimed at intimidating Iraqis participating in an election that will determine whether the country can overcome jagged sectarian divisions that have plagued it since the 2003 US-led invasion.
Iraqis hope the election will put them on a path toward national reconciliation as the US prepares to withdraw combat forces by late summer and all US troops by the end of next year.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is fighting for his political future with challenges from a coalition of mainly Shiite religious groups on one side and a secular alliance combining Shiites and Sunnis on the other.
Despite mortars raining down nearby, voters in the capital still came to the polls. In the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah in northern Baghdad, Walid Abid, a 40-year-old father of two, was speaking as mortars landed several hundreds meters away.
Police reported at least 20 mortar attacks in the neighborhood shortly after daybreak and mortars were also launched toward the Green Zone — home to the US embassy and the prime minister’s office.
“I am not scared and I am not going to stay put at home,” Abid said. “Until when? We need to change things. If I stay home and not come to vote, Azamiyah will get worse.”
Many view the election as a crossroads where Iraq will decide whether to adhere to politics along the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish lines or move away from the ethnic and sectarian tensions that have emerged since the fall of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s iron-fisted, Sunni minority rule.
Al-Maliki, who has built his reputation as the man who restored order to the country, is facing a tough battle from his former Shiite allies, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and a party headed by anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
He also faces a challenge from a secular alliance led by Ayad Allawi, a former prime minister and secular Shiite, who has teamed up with a number of Sunnis in a bid to claim the government.
“These acts will not undermine the will of the Iraqi people,” al-Maliki said yesterday morning, speaking to reporters after casting his ballot.
Exiting the polls, Iraqis waved purple-inked fingers — the now-iconic image synonymous with voting in this oil-rich country home to roughly 28 million people.
However, observers have warned that the election is only the first step in the political process, and with the fractured nature of Iraqi politics, it could take months of negotiations after results are released in the coming days for a government to be formed.
Extraordinary security measures did not foil insurgents who vowed to disrupt the elections, which they see as validating the Shiite-led government and the US occupation. They launched a spate of mortar, grenade and bomb attacks throughout the morning.
In a posting early yesterday on an Islamic Web site, the al-Qaeda front group Islamic State in Iraq warned that anyone taking part in the voting would be exposing themselves to “God’s wrath and to the mujahideen’s weapons,” saying the process bolsters Iraq’s Shiite majority.
In Baghdad’s northeast Hurriyah neighborhood, where mosque loudspeakers exhorted people to vote as “arrows to the enemies’ chest,” three people were killed when someone threw a hand grenade at a crowd heading to the polls, police and hospital officials said.
In the city of Mahmoudiya, about 30km south of Baghdad, a bomb inside a polling center killed a policeman, Iraqi Army Colonel Abdul Hussein said.
At least 14 people died in northeastern Baghdad after explosions leveled two buildings about a kilometer apart, and mortar attacks in western Baghdad killed seven people in two different neighborhoods, police and hospital officials said.
At one of the blasts in northeastern Baghdad, near the northern tip of the Sadr City slum, rescue workers said they could still hear the sound of women and children caught alive under the debris screaming for help.
Rescue workers examined the ruins and used cranes and tractors to lift debris.
An explosion in the mixed neighborhood of Kirayaat, in northern Baghdad, killed one person, police and hospital officials said.
US troops had received reports of 44 significant attacks in Baghdad so far, although most were small, Major William Voorhies said.
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