The young man wore a winter jacket over his explosive vest and approached the Baghdad polling station with his hands in the pockets.
“Take your hands out of your pockets,” said the Iraqi police officer in charge of patting down voters on the street outside. The young man obliged by throwing his arms wide, and blew them both to bits.
Three hours later, some very determined voters were still stepping around bits of flesh as they streamed into the Badr Kobra High School for Girls, intent on casting the ballots that they called a repudiation of the terrorist attacks meant to scare them away.
“I would have been happy to have died voting at the time of this explosion, because this is terrorism mixed with rudeness,” said Saif Aldin Jarah, 61, a balding man with white hair who leaned on his daughter, Shyamaa, as he shuffled into the afternoon sunlight after casting his ballot. “When terrorism becomes aimless and without a goal, it becomes rudeness.”
Nawar Khadim Ahmed had gone home after seeing the man explode as he raised his arms. By 3 p.m., he was back to vote, carrying his 2-year-old daughter, Noor.
“We have to bury this chaos now and form a government,” he said. “This is the time that we make a stand.”
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After the polls closed in Baghdad, Um Rami, 56, a Christian, served orange juice to a group of women and children outside her house. “My sisters, did you have the same feeling I had? I felt as if it was Eid,” she said, referring to Eid al-Adha, a four-day Muslim holiday.
“Every one at the poll center was happy,” she said. “We proved to the world and to the insurgents that no one is supporting them. We win and they lost. They did not think that all of us will gather together for the best of our country. They did not scare any one of us.”
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In Mosul, Ali Abas Khalid was waiting to vote until he could see if anyone else was going. When he finally cast his ballot, he was so tearful, he was able only to say a few words: “We win.”
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In Tikrit, a rumor spread that anyone who did not vote would lose his or her food rations. But that did nothing to boost turnout in ousted president Saddam Hussein’s home town.
“It is a very weak participation in Tikrit,” said Khalaf Muhammed, 43, the electoral commission official in charge of a polling station in the city’s center. He acknowledged spreading the false rumor to try to lure voters.
“Even though we spread a rumor in the city saying anyone who doesn’t vote will be deprived of their food ration, only 10 people voted in the center since we voted, mostly old men.”
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For U.S. Marines helping guard Sunday’s vote, the streams of men and women walking into the gritty polling places of Askan, south of Baghdad, was a payoff more impressive than the toppling of Hussein’s statue in the capital during the fall of his regime in April 2003 – less spectacular but tougher to bring off.
Cpl. Florian Gonzales of Norwalk, Conn., looked on from the sandbagged police station roof.
“Hopefully, what happens today reflects what we’ve been trying to do for the last seven months,” Gonzales said. “I don’t want anyone else to have to come back here and go through what we’ve been through.”
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As expected, many people in the Shiite holy city of Najaf were faithful to calls by the most influential Shiite cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who said every man and woman had the religious duty to vote.
Leaders here underestimated the numbers of voters and hadn’t brought in enough buses to deliver people to the polls. A young boy led an elderly man, painfully plodding along, by the hand.
But when people finally got to ballot booths, it was as if they had reached the end of one of the pilgrimages to the city’s holy shrines.
Crowds burst into impromptu demonstrations, shouting, “No to dictatorship. Yes to democracy,” and “Long live freedom.”
After dark, men crouched on the ground and counted ballots by the glow of an oil lamp because of a power outage.
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