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Chairman of Electoral Commission Faraj al-Haidari said the voter turnout was “good despite (militant) attempts to terrorize citizens”

Earlier, Al Arabiya correspondents reported that voter turnout exceeded 70 percent in the capital Baghdad and 50 percent in in the Anbar province, and recorded less than 50 percent in Karbala.

The city of Nasiriyah, the fourth largely populated city in the country, emerged as a heated election battleground between Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of Iraq’s two vice presidents, Sadrist leader Bahauddin Araji, and Shiite cleric Iyad Jamaleddine

Results and horse-trading

Partial results were not due until Thursday, with full results expected on March 18, according to the United Nations.

But most observers said it would take at least a couple of months of political horse-trading before a new government was formed as no political bloc was set to emerge dominant from the vote.

The capital bore the brunt of Sunday’s violence, with around 70 mortars raining down on mostly Sunni areas as people voted in the second parliamentary ballot since US-led forces ousted former president Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The cities of Fallujah, Baquba, Samarra and several other areas were also hit by mortar rounds or bombs, many of them exploding near polling stations.

An al-Qaeda group, which sees the election as validating the Shiite-led government and the US occupation, warned on Friday that anyone voting ran the risk of being attacked, heightening an already tense security situation.

Baghdad’s streets were all but deserted of vehicles bar those ferrying thousands of police and soldiers, as people journeyed on foot to polling stations across the capital.

“We don’t care about the bombs. The people will vote,” said Abbas Hussein, jangling a set of brown prayer beads with his index finger coated in thick purple ink, signaling he had voted earlier in Mansur, a Sunni district.

Election day violence

An Iraqi man inspects destruction at the site of an explosion in Baghdad

The violence, which came despite 200,000 police and soldiers deployed in Baghdad and hundreds of thousands more across the country of around 30 million citizens, killed 38 people and wounded 110, an interior ministry official said.

Twenty-five of the dead perished when a rocket flattened a residential building in the north of the capital, and all the other deaths were in or near the city.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said the attacks “are only noise to impress voters but Iraqis are a people who love challenges and you will see that this will not damage their morale.”

Khaled Abdallah, 35, was one of the thousands who queued up in the Sunni bastion of Fallujah to cast his ballot.

“My vote today is a defiance of al-Qaeda,” he told AFP.

Myriad problems

The election will usher in a government tasked with tackling myriad problems, including still high levels of violence, an economy in tatters and a culture of endemic corruption.

Seven years after the war, much of Baghdad remains bomb-damaged, most homes receive only a few hours of mains electricity a day and lack clean drinking water, and a quarter of the Iraqi population is illiterate.

The United States hopes the election will bolster Iraq’s democracy, making it a beacon in a region where free and fair elections are the exception, and pave the way to a smooth pullout of American troops.

Maliki, the Shiite head of the State of Law Alliance, is bidding to become the first Iraqi voted back into office at the will of the people who for decades had no choice but Saddam’s Baath Party.

His rivals include Iyad Allawi, a Shiite former prime minister who heads the Iraqiya list, a rival secular coalition that has strong support in Sunni areas.

Also seeking the top job are Ahmed Chalabi, a former deputy premier once favored but now loathed by Washington; Adel Abdel Mahdi, the country’s Shiite vice president; and Baqer Jaber Solagh, the finance minister.

Chalabi, Mahdi and Solagh all represent the Iraq National Alliance, the main Shiite religious list.