Iraqis cast first votes as tensions mount

IRAQ’S election for its first full-term parliament since Saddam Hussein’s overthrow began with special groups voting yesterday.

Militants branded the poll ungodly and vowed to turn the country into an Islamic state.

Election day is set for Thursday but the infirm, security forces members and detainees voted early in hospitals, barracks and jails, inking their fingers to guard against multiple voting.

“They are all looking forward to this voting process since this will be good for the Iraqi people,” said Youssef Ibrahim, an electoral commission worker at a Baghdad hospital.

But Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq and four other Sunni Arab groups, including the Army of the Victorious Sect and the Brigades of Islamic Jihad, branded the election “a Crusader conspiracy”.

“This so-called political process - and those who take part in these apostate elections - is forbidden by God’s laws and goes against our Muslim constitution, the Koran,” they said in a joint statement posted on an Islamist website.

“We will carry on our jihad in the name of God until an Islamic state ruled by the Koran is established.”

The election is being contested against a backdrop of sectarian tensions between the Sunni Arab minority dominant under Saddam and the Shi’ite and Kurdish blocs which dominated the January vote.

Those tensions are likely to rise further after reports yesterday that 13 more prisoners at an Iraqi detention centre had shown signs of torture.

The detention centre was the first examined as part of an Iraqi government inquiry after US troops last month found 173 malnourished prisoners, some showing signs of torture, in an Interior Ministry bunker.

Sunni Arabs accuse the Shi’ite and Kurdish-led government of sending “death squads” in revenge for crimes during the Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam. The government denies the charges.

Security measures are coming into force before Thursday’s vote, seen as an important step for Iraq’s democracy and a signpost on the way toward the withdrawal of US troops.

They include travel restrictions, night-time curfews and the sealing of borders to guard against attempts by insurgents to disrupt the vote for post-war Iraq’s first four-year assembly.

Iraq’s defence ministry predicted they would prevent major attacks but predicted the ballot would follow the pattern of January’s vote for an interim government, when insurgent attacks dramatically increased after the election.

One difference this time is that Sunni Arabs, who largely boycotted the January election, are expected to vote in significant numbers in what would be seen as a success for attempts by the government and its US backers to persuade them to turn away from the insurgency.

Meanwhile, Western anxiety has been focused on the fate of foreign hostages kidnapped in Iraq.

There was still no word yesterday what has happened to four Christian aid workers being held by a little-known Islamist militant group called Swords of Truth, which had threatened to kill them on Saturday unless its demands were met.

The group has been holding two Canadians, a Briton and an American for more than two weeks.

Kidnappers have seized eight foreigners in Iraq since late November and are still holding six, including a German archaeologist and a French engineer.