DAMASCUS, March 5, (Agencies): Iraq’s Sunni Arabs shed their political apathy and voted in force in polls that opened outside Iraq on Friday head of a March 7 election.
“We don’t want our voice to go to waste again,” said Haitham al-Saeed, who fled with his family five years ago to Syria from the district of Adhamiya in Baghdad, home of the shrine of a major Sunni theologian, as sectarian strife mounted.
“I voted for the list I think is most likely to restore security to Iraq.”
Sunni Arabs, generally a privileged minority under Saddam Hussein’s rule, have largely stayed away from the American engineered democratic system since the 2003 US-led invasion, allowing Shiites and Kurds to extend their dominance of Iraqi politics in the post-Saddam era.
The vote for a new parliament will take place inside Iraq on Sunday, but polls opened early in 12 countries to allow eligible voters among an estimated 2 million Iraqi refugees to vote, in countries including Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom.
No clear winner is expected, raising the importance of the exiled vote, especially in Syria, which hosts the largest concentration of Iraqi refugees outside their homeland.
Shiite candidate Iyad Allawi, a former Iraqi Baath Party official who is heading a cross sectarian list, and Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi, a Sunni, visited Syria this week to get out the Sunni vote.
“We voted for the Allawi list. We want security and not sectarianism,” said Marwan Haitham, a Sunni engineer who cast ballots with his wife.
The exercise in democracy is rare in the Arab world, where authoritarian rulers hold power and political systems ensure the marginalisation of non-government-backed candidates.
At the Mezze polling station in Damascus, Iraqi voters were immaculately dressed and families cast ballots holding their children. Syrian forces guarded the premises where signs were written in Arabic and Kurdish, Iraq’s two official languages.
In Jordan, political analysts say most of the voting among the mainly Sunni Iraqi community is likely to go to the Iraqiya election coalition headed by Allawi.
“At least Allawi is not a religious fanatic. We are tired of being ruled by turbans,” said one voter, who declined to give his name.
Iraqi politicians made their final appeals to voters on Friday before a parliamentary election that al-Qaeda-linked militants have sworn to derail through violence.
Few expect a clear winner to emerge from Sunday’s vote, which will shape Iraq’s turbulent politics as US forces that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 prepare to depart.
In leaflets distributed in volatile Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, the Islamic State of Iraq, an al-Qaeda-led umbrella group, warned Iraqis they risked death if they voted.
Suicide bombers killed at least 33 people in Baquba, Diyala’s provincial capital, on Wednesday. Attacks in Baghdad, mostly aimed at soldiers and police who were voting early, killed at least 12 people and wounded 35 on Thursday.
Militants staged no major attacks during Friday. Security forces will ban vehicle movement from 10 pm (2100 GMT) on Saturday until dawn on Monday to try to prevent election day bombings.
On the last day of legal campaigning, Ammar al-Hakim, leader of a powerful Shiite Islamist party, told Iraqis at a rally it was their religious duty to vote, citing appeals issued by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric.
“Look for the lists that have a history and roots and that stood by the Iraqis in good times and bad,” Hakim declared.
Sistani has carefully avoided endorsing Hakim’s Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (ISCI) or any other faction, however, instead urging voters to pick the best individual candidates.
A year ago, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki looked unstoppable as a dramatic security turnaround and slowly improving services proved a formidable weapon for winning votes in January 2009 local polls.
Now, people are asking if Maliki has turned that weapon on himself, as persistent violence, lingering sectarian tensions and growing impatience for public services and growth sow doubts about the Shiite leader’s chances of winning a second term.
Whether Maliki’s State of Law coalition gets enough votes to lead Iraq’s next government — no party is expected to win an outright majority — will shape Iraq’s future as it seeks to solidify security gains ahead of the US withdrawal and end the political bickering that undermines stability.
His recent campaign speeches returned to well-worn themes: fighting terrorism, stamping out Saddam Hussein’s Baath party and nationalism prevailing over post-2003 sectarian conflict.
Dour, formal, and rarely seen cracking a smile, Maliki has more recently added a new theme: seeking to discredit rivals by casting himself as the candidate who gets things done.
“We in the State of Law coalition don’t say that we want to work, because we have worked. We don’t say we want to succeed, because we have succeeded. We don’t say we want to achieve sovereignty, because we achieved it. But now we want to complete what we have begun,” he told tribal leaders this week.
The formation of a new government in Iraq after Sunday’s general election “could take some time” and the transition period is fraught with danger, according to a senior US official.
“It’s hard to put an actual time frame on it, but we are talking months, not weeks,” the official, who asked not to be identified, said Thursday.
After Iraq’s last general election in 2005 “it took about five months for the government to be formed,” the official said, adding that Washington now will watch the process “very carefully because it has the potential to be a dangerous period.”
“We anticipate a difficult process,” full of challenges and claims of fraud “because the stakes are so high,” he added.
In an unrelated development, three Nepali security guards were arrested after firing their weapons as they partied in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, an Iraqi security official told AFP on Friday.
“We cordoned off their property and arrested three people who earlier fired their weapons. They are Nepalese,” said military spokesman Major General Qassim Atta, adding that the guards were partying at the time.
The three men were guarding “an American communications company” based inside the Green Zone, a sprawling, well-guarded complex where many Iraqi leaders, foreign diplomats and businesses are based, according to Atta.
No one was wounded in the incident, he said.
Two security contractors, one British and the other Australian, were killed in an alcohol-fuelled shooting inside the Green Zone in August last year.
British security guard Danny Fitzsimons is to stand trial for the killings.