By the time Mohammed Abu Mustafa, a 37-year-old Sunni engineer, looked out of his window, an American Bradley fighting vehicle had taken up position in his street, its machinegun pointing ominously at some houses.

“I saw a few people go voting but then nothing — just this American armoured vehicle in the street,” he said.

To Shia voters across the city, the US presence was usually a guarantee of security: for Sunnis, resentful of the occupation and suspicious of the post-war political rise of the Shia, it was more often seen as a threat.

“Even those people who wanted to vote were put off by that,” he said from his home in Amariyah, an area of guerrillas and Fallujah refugees which was completely sealed off by Iraqi police — even to accredited journalists.

Baghdad suffered the worst attacks yesterday despite a massive security operation that cleared the streets of all vehicles except tanks, humvees and police cars, filled the sky with helicopters and F-16 fighter planes, and ringed the voter stations with concrete barriers and razor wire. One suicide bomber killed seven civilians and two policemen at a polling station in east Baghdad. Another killed four people in the Sadr city slums, a Shia stronghold.

A mortar attack killed two more. That did not stop inhabitants voting in large numbers in the slums of Sadr City and other Shia areas.

In the upscale, mixed Mansour district, even a suicide bomber who killed several people outside a polling station could not stop others exercising their democratic right. Ayman Khalas, a student, said that even as the police scraped up the bomber’s remains, the queue re-formed and voting resumed. “Nothing was going to stop us,” he said.

In a few Sunni areas like Hay al-Adel, close to the dangerous highway to Fallujah, many Sunnis ventured to the polls despite early outbreaks of fighting. “At first, nobody dared go out. But later when they saw it was reasonably quiet, those who lived close to the voting centres went,” said Omar Nadum, an engineer. But in most Sunni-dominated areas, like Yarmouk, the streets remained empty all day .

In Addumiyah, the last place Saddam Hussein visited as president in the dying days of the 2003 invasion, several polling centres did not even open.

“For me, the results are predetermined, and I don’t think my participation will change anything,” said Omar, a disaffected former army officer whose father was killed by Saddam Hussein’s regime. “First, I don’t doubt there will be ballot-rigging, and secondly, none of the candidates are worthy of representing Iraq or writing its constitution.”

Hay al-Adel, who is close to the Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar, Iraq’s Sunni interim president, attributed any Sunni absence to fear rather than a political boycott. But some Sunnis refused to vote on principle, feeling betrayed by a leadership that they see as pro-American and indifferent to their plight.

It was not bitterness but bureaucracy that thwarted another Sunni former officer. Lieutenant-Colonel Mowatassem al-Jebouri, a former figher pilot, and several neighbours banded together to go and vote in the restive western district of Ghazaliya only to be told by intransigent officials that he was registered in another part of the neighbourhood. The traffic ban meant he could not travel there, so he went home fuming.

The sparodic voting pattern was apparent in many parts of the so-called Sunni Triangle west of Baghdad, though officials said that voting picked up after a slow start.

In Samarra, where guerrillas frequently clash with security forces, the streets were empty all morning. “Nobody came. People were too afraid,” said Madafar Zeki, in charge of the polling centre there. Preliminary figures suggested only 1,400 people voted in a city of 200,000.

In Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, candidates who had hoped for up to 40 per cent turnout were disappointed as voters failed to materialise.

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