Eight die as Iraqis register votes
Iraqis are voting in an election testing the mettle of the country's still-fragile democracy as insurgents killed eight people across the capital with a barrage of mortars intent on disrupting the day.
About 19 million Iraqis are eligible to vote in the election which will determine who will lead the country as US forces go home and whether the country will be able to overcome the jagged sectarian divisions that have defined Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003.
Insurgents who vowed to disrupt the elections -- which they see as validating the Shiite-led government and the US occupation -- launched a volley of mortar attacks just as polls opened across the city and country.
Four people died when two mortar shells landed in a neighbourhood in north-eastern Baghdad, and another four were killed in western Baghdad, also in a mortar attack, police and hospital officials said. There were also explosions elsewhere in the country, but no further reports of fatalities.
Witnesses at the scene of the attack in Baghdad's north-eastern Ur neighbourhood described rescuers pulling bodies from the two-storey building that collapsed.
Insurgents also launched mortars toward the Green Zone -- home to the US Embassy and the prime minister's office -- and in the Sunni neighbourhood of Azamiyah police reported at least 20 mortar attacks in the neighbourhood since day break.
Yet voters still came. In Hurriyah, a Shiite neighbourhood in north-western Baghdad, loudspeakers in mosques exhorted people to turn out to vote -- like "arrows to the enemy's chest".
About 6,200 candidates are competing for 325 seats in the new parliament, Iraq's second for a full term of parliament since the 2003 US-led invasion seven years ago this month.
Many view the election as a crossroads at which Iraq will decide whether to adhere to politics along the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish lines or move away from the ethnic and sectarian tensions that have emerged since the fall of Saddam Hussein's iron-fisted, Sunni minority rule.
