The prettiest Iraqi woman I know told me recently that election day here was “orgasmic.” It certainly started with a bang for me, as a mortar shell landed at about 7.30am not far from where I was living in Sadr City. As I walked the streets, the voting was especially brisk between eight and nine in the morning, and then it appeared to tail off in the late morning.
There was the usual violence in my neighbourhood: a car bomb that killed three people, four mortar shells, sporadic gunfire popping away. By noon, the morning’s eager tone seemed to me to have been replaced by nerves. The prospect of failure and prolonged uncertainty felt on the verge of tipping the balance of confidence and keeping the lazy or doubtful at home.
In Sadr City, according to numerous conversations I have had among Muqtada al-Sadr’s inner echelon, a call had gone out from the young cleric’s headquarters in Najaf that prominent clerics and Mahdi army soldiers were to make themselves seen to be voting. In that huge Shia slum, and elsewhere in Baghdad according to friends I have spoken to, the floodgates burst halfway through the day when people saw that friends and neighbours had had the courage to vote.
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