IRAQ: Even by Iraq's standards of violence the town of Tal Afar has a hideous reputation. Not just among its dwindling, weary population but among the American troops who arrived here to snuff out a sustained and ferocious insurgency.
For two years this scrubland town of 150,000 people and falling, near the Syrian border, has experienced its own terrifying war. Hundreds have died in battles; others have been beheaded, executed, shot. Its police have fled and some of its people have turned up in mass graves.
Yesterday, however, the day of Iraq's first full-term parliamentary elections, there was an unusual sight on Tal Afar's streets: queues of Sunni Muslims waiting to vote. At the Zahawi school, they stood for up to four hours to make their mark, broken up into groups of about a dozen, leaving gaps, to make the crowd a less-tempting target for suicide bombers.
One of the first to vote was Saadal al-Lah. Like almost every other man in the town, the unemployed clerk expressed no appreciation that the US occupation was allowing him to vote. Indeed, like every other Sunni voter interviewed here, he wanted the US to leave Tal Afar and Iraq. "In Saddam's time, it was safer," he said. "You could walk and go anywhere."
Mr Lah said he fled the town temporarily in September when the US launched Operation Restoring Rights to try to remove the insurgents. "I was scared of the Americans and the insurgents," he said. "They were shooting and we were in the middle."
In the previous Iraqi elections in January, which were designed to elect a parliament for one year and draw up a constitution, the Sunnis almost unanimously boycotted. This was partly due to the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who threatened to kill anyone who voted, and partly because the Sunnis did not believe the election would make a difference.
Yesterday the insurgency appeared to be temporarily quelled. US troops formed an outer ring round the school with the Iraqi army and police deployed in and around the polling station.
Tal Afar has been a problem for the US almost since the invasion in 2003. The resistance has been a mixture of home-grown nationalists and two extreme groups, Zarqawi's al-Qaeda and al-Suuna. Last year, the Iraqi police melted away in the face of the insurgency and took refuge in an ancient castle on a hill overlooking the town centre. The insurgents took control.
The school janitor, Abdullah Dawood Mustapha, a Sunni who voted yesterday, blamed the Americans for the fighting and denied there were any terrorists.
"We are afraid of everyone," he said. "We cannot go to market, the Americans shoot, the Iraqi police shoot and the Iraqi army shoot. All Iraqis want the Americans to leave.
"There are no terrorists in Tal Afar."