MOSUL, Iraq — On a last-minute vote drive Sunday in northwest Mosul, Army Lt. Brock Hershberger approached a man wearing an olive-colored suit and brown leather shoes. "Have you voted yet?" Hershberger asked through a translator. The man responded that he'd heard the lines were long.
Of the problems that U.S. and Iraqi forces anticipated during the run-up to election day in this insurgent stronghold, long lines to cast ballots were not at the top of the list.
"He won't have to wait more than 15 minutes," Hershberger said. "Tell him, in America we wait four hours to vote."
Attendance at Mosul's polling sites was reportedly mixed, and there was no official tally of voter turnout by day's end. But some U.S. officials estimated that 175,000 had come out in Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital. About 54,000 voters were said to have turned out in the city of 1.8 million.
Sporadic violence punctuated the day, but there were no mass casualties or suicide attacks in the city.
"It was tentative at first, but by midday and afternoon, people were coming out in droves," said Army Maj. David Spencer, intelligence officer with the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division.
A little before the polls opened at 7 a.m., a group of paratroopers from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division heard the sound of several explosions near their outpost in northwest Mosul.
"That was our polling site," one soldier said.
But the nearby voting station at a school was left unscathed, and by 7:30 the first two voters had cast their ballots.
Throughout the day, soldiers monitored the turnout by radio, with reports coming in every half an hour. The trickle of voters was turning into a stream.
Staff Sgt. Joshua Green, a lone Marine who spent the day at the school with 30 Iraqi Intervention Force soldiers, seemed pleased. Dressed in the uniform of his Iraqi counterparts, Green sported a mustache he had grown to fit in with them.
"I didn't think people were going to show up," he said. "One person showed up in the first hour."
But at one point there were 200 voters in the school, and by day's end, 2,098 people had cast their ballots, more than 100 of them women.
"I'm pretty surprised we didn't get hit with anything," Green said.
There were several mortar attacks and gunfights throughout the city Sunday. At least two Iraqis were killed. Seven U.S. soldiers were injured when an insurgent lobbed a hand grenade over the wall of a polling site in northwest Mosul, just after the gates had closed for the day.
