Iraqi voters defy attacks to make strong turnout in landmark election

Iraqi voters defy attacks to make strong turnout in landmark election

Bush has declared the elections a resounding success in Iraq. 

With polls closed in Iraq, election officials today claimed a 60% turnout on a day that had left at least 33 would-be voters dead.

Baghdad bore the brunt of a series of attacks, with a rapid succession of eight suicide bombings claiming 13 lives in queues for the ballot boxes.

In the Sadr City area of the capital, a further four people died and seven were wounded when a mortar struck a polling station. Mortar rounds also hit several other cities, killing one person in Hilla.

The attacks, which mostly came early in the day, were claimed by followers of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi but did not appear to deter determined voters elsewhere.

The Iraqi election commission estimated that 8 million Iraqis had taken part in the vote for the country’s first multi-party elections for over 40 years. Officials had earlier claimed a turnout of 72% but the commission backtracked and said it had only been an estimate.

The polls officially closed at 5 p.m. local time (2 p.m. GMT).

A senior official from the United Iraqi Alliance, a predominately Shia religious coalition, claimed a widely expected victory based upon the grouping’s own opinion polling. The official election results are published next week.

In the Bush administration’s first response to the poll, Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, said the elections had gone “better than expected”.

The chief United Nations adviser to the Iraqi electoral commission, Carlos Valenzuela, said turnout seemed to be good in most places but cautioned it was too soon to know for sure.

Insurgents had threatened to kill anyone who took part in the election and promised a torrent of attacks. Zarqawi said voters were “infidels”.

U.S. and Iraqi officials imposed strong precautionary measures in the days before the election, closing Iraq’s borders and airspace and deploying tens of thousands of armed men. Civilian cars were banned from the streets to guard against car bombings, but seven of the eight suicide attackers in Baghdad struck on foot.

Casting his vote in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, the interim prime minister Ayad Allawi urged his countrymen to defy the threats and go to the polls.

“This is a historic moment for Iraq, a day when Iraqis can hold their heads high because they are challenging the terrorists and starting to write their future with their own hands,” he told reporters.

In the north, people flowed steadily to the polls in the predominately Kurdish cities of Sulaimaniya and Irbil. At the opposite end of the country, voters in the relatively calm Shia south arrived at polling stations in Basra.

However, it is what happens in the middle that could most determine the impact the election has on Iraq’s future. Final voting figures are expected to reveal high turnout in Shia and Kurdish areas but a low Sunni turnout could undermine the credibility of the election.

Sunni Arabs form 20% of Iraq’s population and live predominately in the areas where the insurgency is at its strongest. The largest Sunni religious party boycotted the poll out of fears that the threats of violence would suppress its support.