A resident casts his vote in a polling station in Baghdad January 31, 2009.

Iraqis voted enthusiastically behind barbed wire and rings of police on Saturday in a provincial poll they hope will solidify the war-battered country’s fragile security gains.

Iraq’s first election since 2005 will pick local councils in 14 of its 18 provinces and show whether Iraqi forces are capable of maintaining peace as U.S. troops begin to withdraw, almost six years after the invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is looking to use the election to build his own power base in the provinces before national polls later this year. Sunni Arab groups who boycotted the last provincial polls are hoping to win a share of local power.

There was something of a holiday atmosphere in many parts of the country. In normally traffic-choked Baghdad, children took advantage of a ban on cars to play soccer in the streets.

“How can we not vote? All of us here have always complained about being oppressed and not having a leader who represented us. Now is our chance,” said Basra voter Abdul Hussein Nuri.

At a polling station in a girls’ primary school in Kerbala, women in black robes and husbands carrying small children packed into classrooms to cast their ballots, watched by election monitors perched on tiny children’s chairs.

Airports and borders were shut and voters were frisked for suicide bomb vests and scanned for explosive residue. There were few security incidents by afternoon and car bans put in place to counter bomb attacks were being lifted early.

Three mortar rounds landed close to voting centers in Saddam’s home town Tikrit but caused no damage, and two civilians were shot in a quarrel with soldiers in Baghdad’s Sadr City slum.

Five candidates were assassinated in the run-up to the election — three of them just two days before the vote. But overall levels of violence have remained low.

“We think one, two or three incidents may happen. We expect it. This country is a newly born democracy,” said Interior Ministry spokesman Major General Abdul Karim Khalaf.

The last election took place amid an al Qaeda-inspired Sunni insurgency and failed to halt sectarian slaughter that sharply worsened between Iraq’s once dominant Sunni Arabs and its majority Shi’ite Muslims. That violence has ebbed since 2007.

“The elections are not boycotted by any major community as has happened in the past,” Andrew Gilmore, deputy head of the U.N. mission in Iraq, told Reuters. “Above all it means these councils should be able to deliver a level of services.”

15 MILLION VOTERS

Just under 15 million of Iraq’s 28 million people are registered to vote for provincial councils that select powerful regional governors. Three Kurdish provinces will vote separately and the election was indefinitely postponed in Kirkuk, an oil-rich province divided between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen.

Around 14,400 candidates are competing for 440 council seats neighborhoodst campaigning made possible by the sharp drop in violence over the past 18 months. Brightly colored campaign posters cover the blast walls that divide Iraqi neighborhoods.

Mobile phones across the country have beeped in unison this week as parties sent last-minute mass campaign text messages.

Maliki, once seen as a weak leader installed by more powerful Shi’ite parties, has seen his stature rise over the past year after a crackdown on militia. He has toured the country in recent weeks campaigning with a law-and-order theme.

“He made it possible for us to go out at night. Now I can take a taxi ride home when I go shopping in the city center,” said teacher Sadiha Karim, who voted for Maliki’s slate in Sadr City, the Baghdad slum where U.S.-backed Iraqi forces drove out black-masked militiamen in heavy fighting last year.

In Shi’ite areas, Maliki’s State of Law coalition is taking on the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which has run most southern provinces since 2005 and campaigned with an overtly sectarian Shi’ite pitch this year.

In the former heart of the Sunni Islamist insurgency, Anbar in the west, tribal chiefs who helped push out al Qaeda hope to win at the expense of the traditional Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party.

Most violence so far has been in the north, where Sunni Arabs boycotted the 2005 elections and have since been excluded from provincial power. Kurds who have run northern Nineveh province are expected to lose power there.

But for many Iraqis the election this time around is less about ethnicity and sect than about competence.

In the dusty town of Khana Sul in Nineveh near the Syrian border, 19-year-old student Jamil Kirtohamo, a member of the Yazidi religious minority, held up the purple-dyed finger that showed he had voted.

“It’s my first time voting and I’m very excited,” he said, pointing to a pothole. “We want whoever wins to pave this road.”

Source: Reuters