Baghdad--Iraqi troops, police, prisoners and the infirm began voting on Thursday, three days ahead of a parliamentary election seen as pivotal for a divided country which US troops are scheduled to leave by the end of 2011. Special voting was taking place for groups not able to cast ballots in Sunday's poll, most of them from the 670,000-strong security forces assigned to protect voting stations. Police in Anbar, a desert province that became the heartland of Iraq's Sunni Muslim-based insurgency after the 2003 US-led invasion, said they had briefly imposed an overnight vehicle curfew after finding a fuel tanker primed with explosives. The discovery came a day after at least 33 people were killed in volatile Diyala province northeast of Baghdad when three suicide bombers attacked police stations and a hospital. Police said they had arrested 10 suspects in connection with the coordinated assaults in Baquba, Diyala's provincial capital. The outcome of the election, Iraq's second full national poll since the invasion, will test progress toward stability. The Pentagon said on Wednesday only an "extraordinarily dire" security deterioration would warrant a slowdown in plans for the remaining 96,000 US troops to end combat operations in August and withdraw completely by the end of next year. Foreign oil firms starting to invest in Iraq's vast oilfields are also watching to see if security gains can be sustained against Shia militia, which the US military says are backed by Iran, and Sunni Islamist insurgents like al-Qaeda. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has based his campaign for a second term in part on claiming credit for a sharp fall in violence as all-out war between once dominant Sunnis and the majority Shias empowered by Saddam Hussein's fall receded. He faces a stiff challenge from his erstwhile Shia partners and also from a secular, cross-sectarian alliance headed by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, and his security credentials have been undermined by a series of devastating assaults on the Iraqi capital by suicide bombers since August.
