Iraq ground to a halt on Wednesday with strict security measures kicking in on the eve of a landmark election aimed at restoring full sovereignty and stability to the strife-plagued country.
A faint call to prayer drifted across the early-morning chill in an almost deserted Baghdad where shops, schools, banks and cafés were closed and most residents stayed home.
A five-day holiday, which began on Tuesday as part of security steps, brought an apparent calm to the city of seven million, better known for devastating suicide bombings, drive-by shootings and grisly kidnappings.
Streets were nearly empty, though a few people could be seen crossing bridges on foot and a young boy wheeled around a major empty intersection on his bicycle.
On Thursday, Iraq’s 15,5-million electorate is called to the polls to elect 275 deputies for four-year terms designed to further Iraq’s transition to a full democracy and eventually allow United States-led forces to withdraw.
Expatriates in 15 countries from Australia to Europe, North America and the Middle East are already casting their ballots in a three-day process that began on Tuesday, with voting completed in Iraqi hospitals and prisons on Monday.
Many Iraqis and foreign diplomats hope that the first full-term legislature since the 2003 invasion to oust Saddam Hussein will draw disaffected Sunni Arabs back into politics and undermine support for the insurgency.
The Sunni minority boycotted elections in January, but more than 1 000 Sunni clerics have pressed members of their community to vote this week in order to maximise their chances of playing power broker in the government.
Choosing a functioning government could, however, take several months, a senior US lawmaker said on Tuesday following a White House briefing on the vote.
”The briefers cautioned that given the multiplicity of parties and interests, solidifying a parliamentary government will not be instantaneous,” Senator Richard Lugar said. ”They indicated that under some scenarios, the selection of ministers might not be finalised until April.”
‘We’re doing it for the future of our country’
Iraqis who had already cast ballots in countries such as Jordan, Denmark and the US expressed their enthusiasm for the process.
”We’re doing it for the future of our country. For the future of our kids,” said Talib al-Bedany, who waved an ink-stained finger after he voted in Skokie, Illinois, following a nine-hour trip with 150 other Iraqis from Nebraska.
In equally chilly Denmark, Shi’ite student Bilal Abdulhadi agreed.
”It’s a crucial vote for our country, for its future,” he said, proudly showing an ink-stained thumb.
About 1 000 Iraqis voted in Amman and dozens in the United Arab Emirates, where armed guards protected polling stations as men in traditional dress accompanied wives and children to the ballot box.
In Iraq, hundreds of thousands of blank ballots copying those to be used in the vote were found in a tanker truck that had come in from neighbouring Iran, security officials said.
”The blank ballots were probably destined to stuff the ballot boxes,” one official said, while another added that authorities were looking for three more suspect trucks.
But Iraqi insurgents struck regardless of the security clampdown that closed airports and borders, killing two police officers in a bomb attack targeting a patrol in the centre of the mixed Sunni Arab and Kurdish city of Mosul.
As campaigning ended on Tuesday, a leading Sunni candidate in al-Anbar province, Mizher al-Dulaimi, was also killed, the latest victim of political assassinations that have marred campaigning.
Al-Qaeda has warned people in Ramadi not to vote and threatened to kill those who take part in the election.
Four US soldiers, a police commando and a businessman working with the US army were also killed the same day.
On the second anniversary of Saddam’s capture north of Baghdad, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sharply accused the international community of snubbing his trial and doing little to help prosecute him.
”The international community’s effective boycott of Saddam’s trial is only harming the Iraqi people who are now working to secure the hope of justice and freedom that Saddam long denied them,” Rice charged. — Sapa-AFP