Baghdad bombing doesn't stop voters
Even after suicide blast, voters turn out By Karl Vick
Updated: 11:03 p.m. ET Jan. 30, 2005BAGHDAD, Jan. 30 - The young man wore a winter jacket over his explosive vest and approached the polling station with his hands in the pockets.
"Take your hands out of your pockets," said Ali Jabur, 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, in streets still littered with the bomber's remains, some very determined voters 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," Jarah said, holding aloft a finger stained purple with indelible ink. "How could they force people not to vote?"
The question was answered emphatically in Baghdad's Zayuna neighborhood.
The blast at the high school killed five people and wounded seven. It blackened the pavement and brought a U.S. Army patrol racing to the tidy streets of an upper-middle-class neighborhood named for a developer's daughter.
It also could have accomplished here what Abu Musab Zarqawi, whose organization asserted responsibility for 13 suicide attacks Sunday, vowed to do all over Iraq: derail the election.
When the suicide bomber at the high school struck shortly before 11 a.m., the polling site had been growing busy after a slow start. But Hadi Saleh Mohammed, the election official in charge, felt he had no choice but to close it down. There were the wounded to evacuate, a gruesome mess to clean up, security to reassess.
While all that went forward, the voters stood at the end of the block, waiting.
"They wanted to come back in," Mohammed said. "They didn't want to go back home."
Why not?
Local residents step in
"First, people want to stop this terrorism that's breeding in this country. Second, the religious leadership wanted people to vote. And third, people have had enough of time wasted. They want to get their permanent government."
So the polling place reopened. On the advice of the U.S. troops, the security perimeter was pushed back a block, so people could be frisked twice before entering the school.
Though performing this duty meant standing amid flecks of the flesh of the last officer who had the job, there were volunteers. In stepping forward to do the first round of pat-downs themselves, local residents explained that they could raise the alert if another suspicious stranger approached.
"The police might not be able to recognize residents; we know them better," said Zaid Abdulhamid, an electronics merchant. He was stationed at the head of an alley blocked by the trunk of a date palm, the all-purpose roadblock in Iraq. The Arabic words spray-painted on the surrounding walls read: "No to America. No to occupation" and "Death to anyone who hates Iraq."
"We want to protect ourselves," Abdulhamid said.
And so, after about an hour, voting resumed.
Najila Amin, a housewife who felt the massive blast in her home, made her way to the scene of the crime.
"We're used to explosions," she said. "It's normal."
What surprised her, Amin said, was the steady stream of people walking past her window toward the school. Twenty people were in the street at any moment, stepping carefully in places the street cleaners had missed.
"I didn't expect such numbers," said Amin, 50, who fastened her head scarf so it showed no hair. "It makes me feel people want to protect themselves and have a government that can protect us."
'People want to be free'
Her companion on the walk to the polls, Taiyma Jamal, 26, said the turnout represented a vote against the insurgency. "People want to be free," she said.
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."
Ahmed, an auto mechanic, said he cast his vote in support of Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister.
"Power," Ahmed said, when asked the reason.
"Don't you want education?" asked Sabah Abdullah Rahman, a retired fighter pilot standing nearby.
"We want power and education," Ahmed said. "He's an educated man."
Rahman nodded. "The Iraqis believe Allawi is a realistic, strong man," he said.
The American troops left after a couple of hours, handing off security to an Iraqi National Guard major and at least a dozen Iraqi police officers, most of them in street clothes.
"This doesn't stop the process," said Sgt. Tahsin Hassan, carrying a pistol in his belt and wearing a look of deep fatigue. The vest bomber had been Hassan's third close call. He had survived a car bombing in the "triangle of death" south of Baghdad that killed two policemen and a roadside bombing that killed two civilians right here in Zayuna.
As he spoke, shots from an assault rifle sounded not a block away. The sentries looked around, but no one on the street so much as flinched, not even a child of 4 clutching his father's hand on the way to the polls.
"We've had enough of this situation," Hassan said. "It becomes normal to us.
"We hear after the elections the situation will stabilize. People want stability." |
