We will never boycott elections again – Mosul citizens

Mosul-Lesson NINEWA – IraqiNews.com: Residents of Mosul city expressed their enthusiasm to take part in the upcoming Ninewa provincial council elections after they boycott the parliamentary and the provincial councils elections’ held in 2005. “I feel regret because I did not participate in the last elections and there is an opportunity to correct this mistake because I’m going to take part in the upcoming elections,” Jassem Zinoon, a 42-year-old taxi driver, told IraqiNews.com news agency. “The boycott of the previous elections was a mistake made by Mosulians,” he said, noting that the boycott led to the formation of a council that did not represent them and gave them nothing. He justified his boycott of the previous elections by saying that he was unsure of their potential impact on the situation in the city. For his part, the director of the Ninewa elections commission, Abdul Khaleq al-Dabagh told IraqiNews.com news agency, that the number of voters who took part in updating their data reached 575543 voters, the highest percentage of participation throughout Iraq. “The Iraqi citizens’ electoral culture has changed, and they became convinced that without their participation in the elections, things will not be good,” he added. Mahmoud Abdul Rahman, a professor at Mosul University, expressed belief that participation in the upcoming elections will set a record because of the bad economic and security conditions in Ninewa, and the conviction in the city of Mosul that changing the conditions should start from the provincial council, especially after the failure of the current council in maintaining security and providing services to the citizens. “The previous boycott is due to local residents’ rejection of the occupation and the presence of many political problems because of the military operations in some Sunni cities, such as Talafar, Falluja, which the Mosulians consider as an attempt to take them away from the political process,” he explained. Fatma Hussein Ahmad, a 33-year-old housewife, said “I’m waiting for the elections to take part in it to change the province’s bad reality.” The Iraqi provincial council elections are scheduled to be held on January 31 in 14 out of Iraq’s 18 provinces. No local elections will be held in Kirkuk and the three autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region provinces of Arbil, Sulaimaniya, and Duhuk. Mosul, the capital city of Ninewa, lies 405 km north of Baghdad. The original city of Mosul stands on the west bank of the Tigris River, opposite the ancient biblical city of Nineveh on the east bank, but the metropolitan area has now grown to encompass substantial areas on both banks, with five bridges linking the two sides. Despite having an amount of Kurdish population, it does not form part of the area controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government Kurdistan RegionG). There are different communities in Mosul like Christians, Shiites and Kurds along with a Sunni majority. The fabric Muslin, long manufactured here, is named for this city. Another historically important product of the area is Mosul marble. The city is also a historic center for the Nestorian Christianity of the Assyrians, containing the tombs of several Old Testament prophets such as Jonah, Yunus in Arabic, and Nahum. SH (I)/SR 3