| Returns made public Tuesday by the Independent Electoral Commission underscored the country's sharp division along ethnic and sectarian lines.
Voters in each of the three northern provinces dominated by Kurds favored the constitution by margins of 99 to 1. In each of the nine predominantly Shiite provinces in the south, the yes votes accounted for more than 94% of the total...Foes of the draft mustered a 97% no vote in Al Anbar province, the heartland of the insurgency, and 82% rejected the charter in Salahuddin, Hussein's home province. But they fell short of the two-thirds benchmark in Nineveh province, which has a large Sunni Arab population and provides strong support for the insurgency but also has a sizable Kurdish minority. The official count in Nineveh was 45% yes and 55% no. |
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