A mortar attack Friday killed an Iraqi soldier and four children playing soccer in a schoolyard that the previous was a polling station in the western Eurphrates River valley town of Parwana. Two children were wounded, the AP reported.
Meanwhile, it is estimated turnout in Thursday's election could have been as high as 70 percent. The election commission said it had received 178 complaints so far, and spokesman Ezzeddin al-Mohamady stated 35 of them charged "violent interference" from the police, army or election workers.
He said most of the rest, 101, were related to campaigning violations such as using religious symbols in campaign ads. "Until now, we have not received any complaints about fraud," al-Mohamady was quoted as saying.
Al-Mohamady confirmed that "there have been some violations in Kirkuk," a northern city claimed by Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen. "There were shortages (of ballots) in some stations. Some voters rolls, maybe, were missing some names. This did not only happen in the Arab area, but in different parts of Kirkuk. This has been fixed and the shortages were taken care of," he said. "There were some attacks on some observers who were at some stations."
In another development, Bulgaria, began withdrawing its 400-soldier infantry battalion from Iraq on Friday, citing the completion of the election. 13 Bulgarian soldiers and six civilians have died while serving in Iraq since August 2003. In May this year, Bulgaria's Parliament backed the government's proposal to reduce the country's military unit in Iraq to 400 by June, and withdraw it completely by the end of December 2005.
Poland, which commands an international force of about 4,000 soldiers in southern Iraq, said Thursday that it will decide within two weeks whether to pullout its 1,500 troops early next year as previous planned or perhaps scale down the mission to a smaller training force.
