29 April 2014

The parliamentary elections are due to take place tomorrow (Wednesday), but late last night a car bomb was detonated at a polling station in the center of Haditha in western Anbar, injuring a number of military and police personnel assigned to guarding the station.

This morning a number of mortar rounds struck a number of polling stations in Ramadi, indicating the difficulties being faced in conducting the balloting. The election commission has announced that it has completed all the preparations for the general balloting; the commission has set up more than 40 polling stations to be used by those displaced from their homes in Ramadi and Fallujah and who are now taking refuge in the western Anbar townships.

In Fallujah, there is no possibility of conducting any balloting and there are no polling stations in the city that has continued through today to be plagued by indiscriminate shelling; 2 women have been declared killed and 7 others were wounded as a result of the shelling of a number of the city's residential districts.

Clashes and shelling are also ongoing in Al-Garma's residential districts, including the areas around the Al-Ru'oud Bridge that has been the scene of major clashes between army forces and the 'Tribal Revolutionaries'.

Today, everybody is awaiting tomorrow's balloting that just might alter the political map of Iraq and that of Anbar in particular.