PAST the broken minarets and US Humvees squatting like armadillos in the dust, the people of Fallujah walked to the polling stations yesterday for what their Mayor described as a “wedding with democracy”.
Thirteen months ago the Sunni minority’s city of mosques was aflame after a ground and air assault by 15,000 American troops.
Fallujah is still effectively under siege. Only half the population — 170,000 people — have returned to the city, often to shattered homes, and they must provide retina scans and fingerprints to get the identity cards permitting them entry.
There are checkpoints designed to stop insurgents sneaking back, while 4,200 Marines carry out joint patrols with 5,000 Iraqi troops and police, raiding houses, rounding up suspects and imposing an 11pm-6am curfew.
No one imagines that this force can seal off the Sunni Triangle’s former insurgency HQ, but it has muzzled, if not tamed, the city where the US has suffered 10 per cent of all its casualties. Indeed, within minutes of the polls closing Marines battened down the hatches in their city centre base as gunfire erupted.
Ten US soldiers were killed on the city outskirts this month, and eleven Iraqi police have been murdered in five months.
It was exactly the barely suppressed hostility to the US military and Shia-led Government that propelled Fallujans to the polling stations in large numbers yesterday. Having failed to shoot them out, they wanted to vote them out.
“The people think that this political operation is the right way to get what they want. Let us see what the politics may give us,” said Hanna Qasaa, a woman election official.
However, voicing the near-unanimous feeling that they reserve the right to fall back on arms, she added: “If the new government does not help us, if it does not say to the Americans, ‘Go from Iraq’, there may be trouble. No Iraqi wants the American army to stay in Iraq. They should go now.”
Although hopeful, most retain the near-universal Sunni suspicion that the system is stacked against them. Nevertheless, political parties have emerged in only a few months to give them a choice of hardline or moderate, local or national, religious or secular.
Expected to do well are Tawafoq, the new Sunni alliance, which is backed by many clerics within the powerful Muslim Scholars Association and whose posters are displayed most prominently on walls across the town.
Also popular among voters were Salah Mutlaq and Ayad Allawi, a Shia but a former Baathist seen as reaching out to the Sunni community more than the Shia-led Government of Ibrahim Jaafari. The latter, according to Sheikh Dhary Abdal Hadi, the Mayor, has provided none of the hundreds of millions of dollars still needed to rebuild the city. With many buildings still shattered, the delay only inflames the suspicions of Sunnis that the Shia-led Government is determined to squeeze them out — confirmed by revelations of their being tortured by security forces in Baghdad.
“If the situation remains like this, more arrests, more bombings and the Government doesn’t listen, there will be big problems,” Najar Abdallah, 26, a mechanic, said. “Now we are going into politics but if that doesn’t work we will go the other way.” More “resistance”? “I think so.”
The insurgents clearly still enjoy widespread support in Fallujah, but are mentioned only indirectly and always as the muqawama — “resistance” — rarely as “terrorists”. One youth, giving his name only as Firas, proclaimed their achievements. “Because of the resistance the Democratic Party in America has started calling to withdraw US troops from Iraq,” he said, smiling. “That’s what the resistance has achieved.”
Sitting alongside US troops in the heavily guarded, sandbagged building where they hold regular meetings, the Mayor and prominent local sheikhs were tetchy when journalists raised the subject of the gunmen who until recently controlled the town.
“Resistance is something and terrorism is something else,” said Sheikh Kamal Shakur, between gritted teeth. “Before the Americans came we never heard of terrorism.”
Whatever they say, privately administrators confirm that behind the scenes the insurgents still hold sway. Nevertheless, there is evidence of tension between the gunmen and local people, some of whom openly oppose bombings of civilians.
Although promising to continue attacking US forces, one insurgency group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, said on Tuesday that it would not attack polling stations. Five other diehard groups, including al-Qaeda in Iraq, also promised not to disrupt voting while declaring the election a “satanic project”.
Many in Fallujah were angered by the recent murder of the town’s mufti, Sheikh Hamza al-Assawi, who was among the first to argue that Sunnis should not boycott the political process as they did in January, repeating the historical mistake of the Shias in the 1920s.
He is dead, but his message was heard. In January turnout was 2 per cent in Anbar province, in which Fallujah lies. It rose to 30 per cent in the October referendum and 90 per cent in Fallujah. By 2pm yesterday, the Mayor claimed, 45 per cent of Fallujans had voted despite problems with election materials.
Locals and Western officials concede that the Iraqi Government and US-led coalition has more control over Fallujah than remoter parts of western Anbar, whose 1.4 million population had 154 polling stations.
There, continuing US military operations and intimidation by al-Zarqawi-style diehards may reduce turnout, even in the provincial capital Ramadi, where on the eve of the election the Sunni candidate, Mezher al-Dulaimi, was killed by unknown gunmen as he filled his car with petrol.
Inside one balloting station Israa, an election official who beamed when talking about Fallujah, descended into tears when asked about relatives elsewhere in Anbar. “They can’t vote because of intimidation,” she cried. “My family comes from Haditha. I have no news of them and I am worried.”
Acknowledging local opposition to continued raids, Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Carroll, an Arabic-speaking US Marine in Fallujah, said: “Despite the Sunni Arabs being upset with our combat operations out in the West, what those were meant to do and I think they have succeeded in great part, is to put an enduring Iraqi security force presence out in some of these cities like Hit, Haditha, Rawah, al-Qaim and so forth.”
‘I am here to vote for my four martyred sons, killed by Saddam’ Fawzia Mehdi, 72
‘The Iraqi people bear responsibility to vote for a better future’ Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s first Kurdish president
‘Today Iraq will be born again, today is Iraq’s birthday’ Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq
‘Please tell Tony Blair that I want to thank him. He made this day possible’ Maher Mehdi Saleh, 38
