High turnout for Iraq vote

A high voter turnout despite a string of explosions and mortar attacks has marked Iraq's historic general election for the first full-term government since the fall of Saddam Hussein.


The high turnout on Thursday's polls forced Iraq's election commission to extend voting by an additional hour around the country.

"We have issued an order to all centres in Iraq to extend the vote by one hour," said Adel al-Lami, the director-general of the Independent Electoral Commission.

With voters lining up in large numbers, polling stations stayed open until 6pm (1500GMT). As voting ended, celebratory gunfire rang out in Baghdad, as much in jubilation as it was in relief for the day having passed off in relative peace.

The decision to extend the closing time was the clearest indication that there was a large turnout at the country's more than 33,000 polling stations.

High turnout

Electoral Commissioner Hussein Hendawi said that turnout could have exceeded 10 million voters, or some 67%, well in excess of the 58% recorded in 10 January when Iraqis voted to elect an interim-parliament.


Security was tight and the day passed off in relative peace


In Saddam Hussein's home province around Tikrit, where few voted in January, the provisional turnout was 83%, an official in the local electoral commission said.

In preliminary estimates of turnout, the electoral commission said 80% of the electorate had voted in Salaheddin, 70% in the Shia town of Hilla and Najaf and 60% in Nasiriyah, further south. Officials estimate some 67% of the electorate voted


Having boycotted the January polls, Sunnis appeared determined to make their voice heard.

In Falluja – the Sunni dominated town and a hotbed of armed opposition to US-led forces - so great was the turnout compared to the previous vote that polling stations ran out of ballot papers during the day, causing long queues to form.

Entire families walked through the town's car-free streets while children enjoyed their holiday playing football.

The scene was in stark contrast to empty streets last January when the war-ravaged town boycotted elections for the transitional assembly.

"There was more diversity in this election," Election Commissioner Farid Aiyar said.

Stray violence

By casting their ballots, Iraqis chose to ignore the explosions and violence reported during the day.

Two people were killed and three wounded in bomb and mortar attacks on polling stations at Mosul and Tal Afar in the north.

A dawn mortar blast claimed by a Sunni Islamist group wounded three people, including a US Marine, in Baghdad's Green Zone government and diplomatic compound, the US embassy said.

General calm imposed by a three-day traffic ban, sealed borders and heavy security was also broken by mortars in Samarra and nearby Tikrit. Another explosion rocked Ramadi.

The peaceful conduct of the polls and the high turnout warmed many hearts.

Elections hailed

The United States hailed the elections as historic.

"This is a historic day for the Iraqi people, the Middle East and the world, a historic day for the advance of freedom," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

"This is a historic day for the Iraqi people, the Middle East and the world, a historic day for the advance of freedom"

Scott McClellan,
White House spokesman


Compliments poured in as well for the Iraqis from the United Nations and the British government.

There are no reliable opinion polls; but observers expect the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), a grouping of conservative Shia Muslim parties within the current coalition government, to win the most votes.

Its share is expected to fall, however, from the 48% it won in January to perhaps about 40%.

The Kurds, the second-biggest bloc in parliament, are predicted to win about 25% of the vote, and will be pushed hard for second place by Iyad Allawi, a former interim prime minister, whose broad coalition took 14% in January but is expected to make ground.

Bombers hit Iraq police school

At least 36 Iraqi police officers and trainees have been killed after two bombers blew themselves up in a Baghdad police academy classroom, the Iraqi police say.

The two bombers struck at Baghdad's police academy on Tuesday, killing at least 36 officers and cadets and wounding more than 50, officials said.
Confusion surrounded the gender of the two bombers. Bayan Baker Solagh, the Iraqi Interior Minister, said the attacks were carried out by two Iraqi policewomen.
However, al-Qaida in Iraq, claiming responsibility for what is the bloodiest attack in three weeks, said in an internet statement that "two brothers" had carried out the attack on a police force it said was persecuting Sunni Arabs.
The Shia-led government, facing an election next week amid daily violence, denies such accusations.
The US military initially blamed the attack on two female bombers, later saying they were male.

Bodies discovered

Also on Tuesday, Iraqi police said they had discovered nine bodies with gunshot wounds near a mixed Shia and Sunni Arab town south of Baghdad.
The bodies of the men in their 30s, apparently civilians, were discovered near Musayyib, south of Baghdad. They had all been shot at close range, said police.
Many security services members died in violence across the country
Elsewhere around the country, 11 other Iraqis, mainly from the security services, died in other violence.
The flurry of deadly attacks targeting security officials have heightened concerns about increased unrest in the run-up to Iraq's election on 15 December for the first post-invasion parliament on a four-year term.In Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, north of the capital, two council workers were killed and a third abducted.
In Salah al-Din, three members of the northern Iraqi oil company's security force were killed as they patrolled a pipeline near Sherqat.

Drive-by shooting

In the village of al-Khalis, north of Baquba, one of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's bodyguards was killed in a drive-by shooting.Al-Jaafari was on an official visit to Tokyo, and the bodyguard had been on his way to visit his family.
On the road between Baghdad and Baquba, an Iraqi army colonel and his driver were found shot dead, police said. Baquba has seen many attacks on US and Iraqi forces
Baquba - the site of an ongoing revolt - was on Saturday rocked by an attack on an Iraqi army convoy that killed 19 soldiers.In Baghdad, the Interior Ministry said police General Hamza Hussein Fadel and a passenger in his car had been shot dead by unknown attackers in the capital's southern Dura district.A policewoman was shot dead in Baghdad's western Amriyah district.

Death sentence

Meanwhile, in Karbala, a Salafist (follower of a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam) was sentenced to death for his alleged involvement in a December 2004 attack in the Shia city, a judicial source said.Faiz Jalil Shaalan was sentenced to death by a criminal court. He was arrested following a bomb attack in which Shaikh Abd al-Mahdi al-Karbalai, a representative of Shia Grand Ayat Allah Ali al-Sistani, was wounded.Seven people were killed and another 30 wounded in the sectarian attack, which happened near the tomb of Imam al-Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, whom the Shia revere.The death penalty, originally suspended by the Americans following the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, was reinstated by the US-backed interim Iraqi government in June 2004.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonwealth, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.