Registration opened yesterday for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi expatriates worldwide.

"I lost lots of friends and relatives in Saddam Hussein's regime and I have never voted before," Nassima Barzani, 68, said.

"This is the first time in my life I have voted and I am voting for our future," said Barzani, who has lived in Australia since 1995 after she and her late husband fled Iraq along with thousands of others Kurds in 1975.

The Iraq election is billed as the first poll since the former ruling Baathist party, later led by Saddam Hussein, took power in 1968.

Up to 1.5 million Iraqis outside their country are expected to register to vote, said Bernie Hogan, director of the Iraq Out-of-Country Voting (OCV) in Australia.

Australia was the first of 14 nations to register Iraqi expatriates ahead of the vote for a transitional national assembly.

Voting outside Iraq will take place on January 28-30.

"It's 24 years for me and there are more people who have been waiting for more than that," said Kassim Abood, senior Iraqi adviser to the OCV program in Australia.

Violence claims at least 18 lives Inside Iraq, however, things looked grimmer.

Insurgents stepped up their intimidation attacks on Sunday two weeks before the January 30 election, ambushing a car carrying a prominent woman candidate, blasting polling centers and killing Iraqi police and others.

In Baiji yesterday, a suicide carbomb attack on police headquarters killed at least 10 people.

Witnesses said burnt bodies were scattered in the compound in Baiji, an oil refining town in the Sunni heartland north of Baghdad. A police official said at least 20 people were wounded, mostly police.

Near Baquba, another guerrilla stronghold northeast of the capital, gunmen opened fire at a checkpoint and killed eight soldiers, a National Guard officer said.

The area is considered a hotspot of the insurgency as violence flares before a crucial national election later this month.

A statement from followers of al-Qaida ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted man in Iraq, said they had carried out an attack in Baquba and issued a new warning to Iraqi security forces, who are struggling to protect themselves.

Police in Basra said mortars were fired overnight at three schools in the city that will be used as voting centers. They said nobody was wounded.

Iraqi security forces have borne the brunt of insurgent attacks as the polls approach. Election officials have also been repeatedly attacked and threatened, and voting centers, hit.

US troops staged a series of raids in Mosul and other parts of northern and central Iraq, arresting dozens, in an effort to improve security before the balloting two weeks away.

US and Iraqi officials have insisted that the elections go ahead as scheduled, despite the persistent violence.

Interim President Ghazi al-Yawer said that if the elections were postponed for six months, there was no guarantee the violence would wane. The insurgents "might lay down for two or three months, then carry out attacks again," he said.

(China Daily January 18, 2005)