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| Iraq |
| Gunmen attack, burn voting station |
| 2009-01-28 |
| Gunmen attacked and set fire to a voting station in an Iraqi province that was once the heartland of Sunni Islamist resistance to the US invasion, police said four days before milestone local polls. The voting station set up in a school in a remote area 10 km south of the city of Falluja in the western province of Anbar was unoccupied and nobody was hurt in the attack on Tuesday, said police major Ahmad Al Falluji. "Our forces, after receiving information, headed to the site and put out the fire. There was no one inside," Falluji said. "We don't know who is behind it. We expect this was a group that is trying to disturb the peace of the electoral process." Iraq holds provincial elections on Saturday that will test recent security gains and see whether the country is able to resolve disputes at the ballot box rather than through violence. The sectarian slaughter and insurgency unleashed by the 2003 US-led invasion have finally begun to fade and Iraqi troops and police are taking on primary responsibility for ensuring the safety of voters while US forces remain in their barracks. The vote will select provincial councils that pick powerful governors in 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces, and may also give some insight into the political strength of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki ahead of parliamentary elections later in the year. Anbar, a vast desert region bordering Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, was once the main battleground for Al Qaida and other Sunni Islamist groups fighting US soldiers. But the province's tribal chiefs turned on Al Qaida because of its harsh measures, and joined up with the US military. Anbar has been quite peaceful of late though analysts warn that tensions have been rising before the vote. The province's mainly Sunni Arab population boycotted the last vote in 2005 and its local council was appointed. Some of the tribal chiefs whose US-paid fighters took on Al Qaida have entered the race, and hope to defeat the incumbent councillors, many of whom belong to or are allied with the main Sunni Arab parliamentary bloc, the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP). |
| Posted by:Fred |