31 January,2009 11:54 AM IST | | Reuters
Iraqis voted behind barbed wire and rings of police on Saturday in an election that tested the war-battered country's fragile security gains and which may ease lingering sectarian resentment still fuelling violence.
Iraq's first election since 2005 will pick local councils in 14 of its 18 provinces and show whether Iraqi forces are capable of maintaining peace as US troops begin to pull back, almost six years after the invasion to unseat Saddam Hussein.
The last election took place amid an Al-Qaeda-inspired Sunni insurgency and was followed by a wave of sectarian slaughter between Iraq's once dominant Sunni Arabs and its majority Shi'ite Muslims.
A relatively peaceful and credible election will show Iraq has moved on from solving disputes with bullets, and will set the stage for a parliamentary vote late in the year, in which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will seek to renew his mandate.
Maliki is challenging dominant Shi'ite rivals in the south, tribal sheikhs who fought Al-Qaeda are taking on Sunni religious parties in the west, and Arabs in the north who boycotted the last vote are looking to win a share of power from Kurds there.
"My suffering has pushed me to vote," said electoral worker Asad Wahayab in the southern oil city of Basra, who added that after the election he would go back to being unemployed. "We have suffered a lot and this is our chance to vote for change."
Just under 15 million of Iraq's 28 million people have registered to vote for provincial councils that select powerful regional governors. Three Kurdish provinces are to vote separately and the election in oil-rich, disputed Kirkuk has been put off because no one could agree on election rules.
Around 14,400 candidates are competing for 440 council seats in exuberant campaigning that has been made possible by a sharp drop in violence over the past 18 months.
Layers of campaign posters decorate the blast walls that divide Iraqi neighborhoods, and balloons bearing political messages compete in the skies with airships used by US forces to spot mortar or rocket attacks by militants.
