tough day

[46zilzal]

Several Iraqi cities have been rocked by mortar and car bomb attacks, as voters began trickling in to polling stations.

Several loud explosions rocked central Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and Baquba shortly after the start of voting on Sunday.

The blasts came from different districts in the centre of the capital and police said an explosion had jolted the Mansur district, an upper class area of western Baghdad.

Iraqi police said the Mansur attack was a car bomb at a makeshift polling station in the Zahra school. Sources said one six people were killed, including an Iraqi security member. Thirteen others were injured.

In northern Iraq, six explosions rocked Mosul early on Sunday but there were no reported casualties. One polling station visited by the media was empty.

Similarly, a mortar shell landed near a polling station in the southern city of Basra, but there were no reports of causalities.

In the northern city of Balad, a mortar attack on a polling station killed one woman and wounded another woman and her child.

Stolen police vehicles
Rafi al-Bayati, an independent Iraqi journalist in Baghdad, said about 20 explosions were heard throughout the city early on Sunday.

Iraqi police: The whereabouts of the stolen vehicles are unknown
He said rockets appeared to have been launched from the al-Ghazaliya distict west of Baghdad directly hitting polling centres.

Al-Bayati also learned from local police sources that about 20 police vehicles and ambulances had been stolen in the past few days and believed to be rigged with explosives.

US military authorities had warned before the election that attacks and bombers were likely on election day.

Also in Baghdad, US forces opened fire on Iraqi security officers belonging to the interim interior ministry. Two were severely injured and taken to a nearby hospital, al-Bayati said.

Sadr City casualties

Meanwhile, mortar shells struck a polling station in Sadr City killing four voters and wounding seven others.

Earlier, about 10 women and 18 men lined up outside polling stations as similar scenes played out across Iraq. In the Shia shrine city of Najaf, five men were seen queuing outside one polling centre.

A few mortars exploded near the US military base in the northern city of Kirkuk shortly before the voting centres opened.

No Samarra vote

Meanwhile, the head of the local council in Samarra said no citizens would vote because of the poor security situation.

"Nobody will vote in Samarra because of the security situation," said Taha Husain, the head of Samarra's local governing council.

No employees turned up at polling centres in Samarra and police were not to be seen on the streets, an agency correspondent reported.

[lsbets]

Interesting choice of news from the elections to post. There is good news all over the net and bad news too, yet for some reason you choose to only post bad news. It seems to me that you want the elections to fail.

Here is some good news:

- all over Iraq people are going to the polls despite the risks because they want to vote for their future. In many areas turnout will be much higher than it was in our election here in the States.
- there were well over 100 political parties in Iraq participating in this election. While it seems that one Shia party will pick up most of the seats, minority and dissenting voices have been heard throughout the leadup to the election.
- cars were driving through Baghdad over the last few days with men hanging out the windows holding signs urging people to vote for one candidate or another
- after the lack of voters in some Sunni areas in the morning, lines have begun to form at many polling places

Now I'm not saying that the elections are going to be a success. I sure as hell hope they are, and it warms my heart to see people who are willing to risk their lives to vote. And it pisses me off to no end to see people who seem to be rooting against those who would put their lives on the line to cast a vote. In one mosque on Friday, the worshippers were saying they would bath for death before going to vote, and that if they died, they would die while making their voices heard. In one southern town last week, the council had a debate about how to get the prisoners in the jails to the polls - escort them or turn them loose for they day and tell them they had to come back. Am I rooting for these people? Yes I am, as much as I have ever rooted for anything before in my life.

[Equineer]

46ZilZal,

Given all that you posted, the turnout will hopefully approach or exceed our own 2004 election insofar as percentage of eligible voters casting ballots. This could be achieved if more than 8-million votes are cast.

At the national level, list-voting will challenge the 111 political entities to wisely fill however many of the 275 national assembly seats they win, as determined by national percentage results as opposed to the way we elect our Congressmen from within distinct congressional districts.

IMHO, this difference makes the Sunni boycott self-defeating because they could wind up having practically no representation in the assembly. If the Sunnis had followed the Kurdish strategy, these two minorities might have won 40-45% of the national assembly seats, which would make it much less likely that extremists among the Shiite majority could successfully overreach for power in the coming months.

[lsbets]

http://www.scrappleface.com/MT/archives/002047.html

[Tom]

So what Vet is saying is that the Sunni's are Iraq's version of the DNC? totally left out by thier own studidity? :D

lsbrets....you are a part of history. Whatever happens, there is no doubt that the right thing was done in the name of liberty and freedom. Just listening to the "chatter" here amoung the wack-o's is proof enough. It is probably for the best that the moonie-sunni's are left out - they had their shoit at governing and proved to be a most lacking people. They probably bring nothing to the table but problems anyway.