Iraqi ex-pats vote at the polls

Iraqi voters, hoping to restore order and security to their troubled nation, filed into schools and other makeshift polling stations in neighbouring nations today to cast ballots in their nation’s first democratic election in half a century.

Expatriate Iraqis were voting in 14 countries around the world, but in the Middle East, and especially in autocratic Syria, the election represented a rare exercise in democracy.

Security was tight at the 10 voting stations in Damascus and its suburbs, with private security guards frisking voters before they were allowed to enter.

Though turnout was light this morning, the first of three days of expatriate voting, many Iraqis were thrilled just to have the opportunity to influence their country’s future.

“Iraqis are finally expressing themselves. It is a victory for all the dead that Saddam Hussein killed,” said Falastin Saheb, 25, an Iraqi who has been living in Syria for two years and is running the polling centre in Rukn el-Din, a Kurdish neighbourhood.

Banners outside the centre read: “Let us hear your voice.”

According to the Geneva-based International Organisation for Migration (IOM), there are 201,000 Iraqis living in Syria, but only 8%, or 16,581, have registered to vote.

“Ask anyone, and they will tell you that Iraqis want stability and freedom. That’s what we want,” Saheb said.

The voting was taking place in Syria despite strong reservations about the election from the country’s leadership.

In an interview with Arab reporters accompanying him on a state visit to Moscow, Syrian President Bashar Assad said he supported elections in Iraq in principle, but that “conditions were not ripe” citing a boycott call by some Sunni Muslims.

“Postponing the elections is a problem, and holding them is a problem,” he was quoted as saying in the pan-Arab Al Hayat daily today.

The US has accused Syria of meddling in Iraqi affairs and harbouring Saddam sympathisers and members of his former regime. Syria has denied the charges.

Iraqis voting in polling stations scattered throughout the Middle East, in the United Arab Emirates, Iran and Jordan, expressed hopes that the vote would help lead the country to peace.

“I am voting for security, stability and peace. I want to go back to my hometown, Basra, and die there,” said Hameed Allwan, 68, who fled to Jordan 19 months ago to escape the violence.

Allwan voted at a Jordanian school, where Kurdish women garbed in their red, green and blue native dress waited alongside Arab men in traditional brown robes and white head-dresses to cast their ballots.

One man, who identified himself only as Abu Salem, travelled with his family to Jordan from the town of Bashiqa in northern Iraq, because violence was so intense he was afraid to vote there.

In Iran, 75% of the 81,000 eligible voters registered. Many of Iraq’s Arab neighbours fear the country’s Shiite Muslim majority, long suppressed under Saddam, will vote in a government that will strengthen ties to Iran’s ruling Shiite clerics.

Many of the voters waiting outside a Tehran mosque used as a polling station said they came out of respect for Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, who has called voting a “religious duty”.

Saja Verdi, 26, an unemployed mother of two, said: “It’s a very happy day for me, I am happier than on my wedding day. We are going to a start a new life in Iraq after long years of oppression.”

In Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, around 3,000 voters showed up at two polling centres this morning.

Monzir Lijbouri, a Dubai-based businessman who voted in a large air conditioned tent housing 10 ballot boxes, called the elections a “turning point” for Iraq and said he had no choice but to vote for the transitional assembly that will write the nation’s constitution.

Several voters in the region said the US presence in Iraq cast a shadow over the poll, but they hoped free elections would be a first step toward a US withdrawal.

“I am voting with sadness because the Americans have occupied Iraq and we want them out,” said Nizar Kazem Jaber, a 28-year-old Shiite from Nasiriyah who fled to Syria eight months ago to escape the violence.

But for Hassoun Qanbar nothing could ruin voting day, which he called “the best day in my life.”

Qanbar’s two brothers were executed by Saddam Hussein’s regime and he has been in exile for 25 years.

“It’s the dream I never dared to dream,” he said in Dubai. “It’s the day I regain my dignity, my pride, my individuality after 25 years of alienation and oppression,” he said.

But in Iraq the run-up to the election was once again marred by violence.

Three US soldiers were killed today when a roadside bomb exploded in western Baghdad, military officials said. The three were from Task Force Baghdad but no further details were available.

Two other soldiers assigned to Task Force Baghdad were killed in separate attacks earlier today.

Also in Baghdad, an US Army helicopter crashed tonight and the fate of the crew was not immediately known, a US military official said.

It is not thought the helicopter was hit by hostile fire, but investigations arfe still under way, said Lieutenant Colonel James Hutton.