Explosions Hit Baghdad as Iraqis Vote in Pivotal Election

A concerted wave of attacks struck Baghdad and other cities across the country on Sunday as Iraqis voted to elect a new parliament and possibly a new prime minister. Explosions reverberated across the capital moments before the polls opened and continued through the morning haze for the first hours of voting.

At least 38 people were killed and dozens more wounded in Baghdad alone by the time polls officially closed there, the Interior Ministry reported.

Insurgents in Iraq had vowed to disrupt the election, and the attacks appeared timed to frighten voters away from polling sites. If that were the intent, it did not succeed entirely.

By late morning the attacks — dozens of mortars, rockets and bombs — had tapered off, and Iraqis lined up to vote, many of them expressing anger and determination.

“Everyone went,” Maliq Bedawi, 45, who works at Baghdad International Airport, said as he waved his purple-stained finger. He stood outside the rubble of an apartment building that was struck and destroyed by what the police said was a Katyusha rocket. “They were defiant about what happened. Even people who didn’t want to vote before, they went after this rocket.”

Iraqis, he went on, “are not afraid of bombs anymore.”

By late afternoon, it was still too early to measure turnout, though Western election observers noted a significant increase in voting as the day passed. Polls closed at 5 p.m. In parts of Baghdad, the city seemed far from hunkered down, with shops and restaurants opening and families walking on the streets.

But the intensity of the morning barrage, at least for a while recalled the worst days of bloodshed in 2006 and 2007, when Iraq teetered on the precipice of civil war. Mortars or rockets fell across the capital, including at least six that landed in the Green Zone, where government ministries and embassies are clustered behind heavy fortifications.

The deadliest single attack occurred at the apartment building located in the Ur neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad. At least 10 people in that attack died, according to witnesses, the owner of the building and a security official.

“This is the security that Maliki brings to us,” said a woman in Karrada, on the Eastern Bank of the Tigris River, referring to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. As explosions rumbled like thunderclaps, she said she was fleeing with her son, though it was not clear to where.

Mr. Maliki, the Shiite who has held the post since 2006, cast his ballot at the Rashid Hotel in the Green Zone in the middle of the barrage. In a televised interview afterward, he too expressed defiance and optimism that the turnout would not be diminished by the violence.

“Normally the beautiful days in life come after fatigue and difficulties,” he said. “The difficult labor produces a more beloved result.”

The attacks appeared to unite Iraq leaders across party lines.

“These are the messengers of Iraq’s enemies, the enemies of democracy,” said Ammar al-Hakim, a leader of a Shiite coalition, the Iraqi National Alliance, that hopes to deny Mr. Maliki a second term. “It is a desperate and weak message.”

The violence was not limited to Baghdad, though it was far less deadly outside the capital. In Anbar province west of Baghdad at least 20 explosions rang through the city of Falluja beginning at 8 a.m. The police there said they were mortars fired from the outskirts of the city.

A roadside bomb exploded in Kirkuk, while two struck in Mosul, in northern Iraq, including one near a polling station that wounded seven. Mortar shells landed in Jorf al-Sakhar, a village south of Baghdad.

A series of attacks also struck across Diyala, the volatile province northeast of Baghdad. Two of them were improvised bombs that struck an American and an Iraqi convoy, according to security officials there. At least four people were injured, two of them Iraqi soldiers.

The extensive use of mortars and rockets suggested that insurgents had shifted tactics, perhaps because they were unable to maneuver cars or suicide bombers into the cities because of an intense security lockdown, with checkpoints erected every few hundred yards in some places.

Once the initial barrage subsided, officials in Baghdad announced an easing of the curfew on the movement of vehicles, which allowed more people to get to the polling stations.

Sunday’s voting came after a short, intense campaign that could solidify Iraq’s nascent democracy or leave the country fractured along ethnic and sectarian lines. The campaign unfolded as the most open, most competitive election in the nation’s long history of colonial rule, dictatorship and war.

Iraq’s election is a test of the country’s democracy, nearly seven years after the American overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Whether it succeeds could affect a final American withdrawal now scheduled to be completed by the end of 2011.

Despite a long delay, disputes over candidates’ qualifications, arrests and assassinations, the country’s main political blocs competed fiercely at the ballot box to win an election that remained too close to call, something rare in a region dominated by authoritarian governments.

By all accounts, no single party or coalition was expected to win an outright majority, setting the stage for a period of turmoil — months, not weeks, politicians here say — as parties try to cobble together the majority of seats in the country’s new 325-member Parliament to select a new prime minister. Official results are not expected for at least a couple of days.

Mr. Maliki, a Shiite who has refashioned himself as a nationalist leader over the last four years, with mixed results, faced formidable challenges from the Iraqi National Alliance and from another coalition, Iraqiya, led by a former interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi.

Mr. Allawi also expressed resolve after the attacks, though in a late bit of campaigning, he criticized the “weakness” in the government’s security preparation in televised remarks.

“You know that Iraqis do not get scared,” he said. “They will not be scared by tanks, bombings and explosions. They fought the British, as it is known, with simple weapons and kicked out the British empires. So this intimidation will not work.”

The competition among the main Shiite parties, divided this time, could be decisive. Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric whose followers fought against the American military and Mr. Maliki’s government, urged Iraqi Shiites to vote.

“Participation in the election is a sort of political resistance,” he said in remarks broadcast on television in Iran, where he is said to be studying to become an ayatollah.

For the first time, the Sunni minority that under Mr. Hussein dominated Iraqi politics is expected to participate in force, potentially reshaping the country’s political landscape. In Anbar, many voters interviewed on Sunday suggested the Sunnis had thrown their lot in with Mr. Allawi, a Shiite whose Iraqiya coalition has become an unlikely standard bearer for the Sunnis.

The election could also begin to resolve — or worsen — the delicate questions of political control in dispute regions like Kirkuk and Nineveh, where Arab and Kurdish aspirations conflict.

In Kirkuk, a divided city and region, Kurds began celebrating even before the polls close, with cars clogging the streets, their passengers waving Kurdish flags.

An official with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Rizar Rashid, predicted that the main Kurdish alliance had won at least 45 percent of the vote in the region. Such an outcome, if true, could intensify the political struggle over control of the province, which Kurds claim as part of their autonomous region.

Iraqi officials had braced the country for attacks. Threats were circulated in leaflets in Diyala and Anbar, a throwback to the volatile elections of 2005, when suspicion and insurgency kept people away from the polls, especially Sunnis.

“I think those are miserable and desperate attempts that did not affect the atmosphere of the elections,” the spokesman of Baghdad Operations Command, Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, said in remarks broadcast on television.

Even so, he said that Iraq’s security forces had orders to strike the launching sites of the rockets, which seem to have caused the majority of the blasts that shook the city.

He said at least one site had been located and struck west of Taji, a village on the northern outskirts of Baghdad. He said the Iraqi military had requested that the Americans increase air sorties over the city, which was evident in the skies: Apache attack helicopters circled above the Tigris River, as did Iraqi helicopters.

General Atta urged Iraqis to vote despite the violence. “There are few hours left, and it will not be free from challenges,” he said. “We would not give a rosy pink picture of the situation. We need the spirit of defiance, which our proud and honest citizens have always showed us.”

One of the most significant differences between now and Iraq’s last parliamentary election is the strength of the country’s security forces. In 2005, what police and army units existed were poorly trained, poorly funded and heavily reliant on the American military. For this election, they saturated cities and towns across the country, closing internal borders and imposing a curfew on vehicles, even bicycles, that left the streets largely deserted.

Unlike during any of Iraq’s elections and referendums before — for a provisional assembly, for a parliament, for a constitution and provincial assemblies — Iraqis controlled the streets and borders. The American military, already largely withdrawn from the cities, provided assistance and planning, but remained behind the scenes.

After the attacks, Iraqi officials implored Iraqis to vote. In Falluja, turnout appeared to pick up by late morning. In the Julan neighborhood, scene of some of the most intense fighting when American forces besieged the city in 2004, loudspeakers at mosques implored people to head to the polling stations.

“Don’t be afraid of those cowards,” a police man shouted from a rooftop to residents passing in the streets. Some voters took pride in defying those behind the attacks.

“Even if it rains mortars, I’m still going to vote,” Ra’ad Naif, a 19-year-old student, said.