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Irbil, Iraq - For
Fatima Ibrahim, casting a ballot Sunday amounted to
settling accounts with Saddam Hussein for destroying
her family.
"Now I feel that Saddam is really gone," she said,
smiling as she headed home.
Ibrahim was 14 and a bride of just three months when
the Iraqi dictator had her husband, father and
brother rounded up in a campaign of ethnic purging
in the northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan. That was
22 years and two Iraq wars ago, and they have never
been heard from again.
Now 35, the black-clad woman had come to the school-
turned-polling station with the mother-in-law and
sister-in- law who are all that remain of her
family.
"Taking part in the elections is in a way like
taking my revenge from Saddam," she said. It was
"like embracing my love, my brother and my father."
While the rest of Iraq was voting in a free election
for the first time in at least 50 years, the Kurdish
democracy that has blossomed under U.S. and British
air cover since 1991 has produced two elections, so
it wasn't such a novelty here.
But it was complicated, especially for Ibrahim and
mother-in-law Salha Omar, who are both illiterate.
With Omar's 30-year-old daughter Vian in tow, they
set out for the polling station like children on
their first day of school, excited but also nervous.
They had to cast three ballots: for a regional
Kurdish government, for municipalities and for a
national parliament.
Ibrahim dug into her bra and produced a campaign
leaflet with the number 209 and the yellow and red
flag of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the
two major Kurdish parties.
That was their choice, they told an election
official. Now, would he help them mark the ballots?
The official, punctiliously neutral, insisted an
election monitor watch as he guided them through
their choices.
"I will wring your neck if you cheat us," the
mother-in-law told the official jokingly.
She giggled as a female official stuck her index
finger into a bottle of purple ink - a safeguard
against voting twice.
AP
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