"When the civil war comes to Iraq, it will bring a fire so hot it will burn the wet with the dry," he said. Then he gave me a Turkoman Front flag, a Turkoman Front lighter and a stainless steel watch with their symbol on the faceplate. On Election Day, the Front didn't make trouble and the streets around his office were deserted.

Like the Afghan elections last fall, no one can really say if Iraq's were fair. Almost no one was willing to risk sending international monitors. I didn't see any outright cheating, but the playing fields were as crooked as the day is long. The night before the election, I took a tour of one voting station in the Kurdish neighborhood of Shorja. Pictures of Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani were still hanging over the door to the voting booths. The manager said he had forgotten to take them down and quickly covered up the portraits, mostly, with a few sample ballots.

On Sunday morning, the polling stations in Shorja were packed with voters. At one, I saw a line of more than a thousand men and women with their kids, everyone in Sunday best. The men wore suits, the women long dresses and gold coin jewelry. Their numbers constantly replenished as the day wore on. It wasn't long before the Kurds started to party -- even a couple of years on, many still can't believe that they're finally back in Kirkuk. Along the streets hung Kurdish flags the size of billboards. Kurdish men and women danced to drums in something between a stomp and a Texas line dance.

The sight of a long line in a public place made me shiver; on a typical day in Baghdad, it would be an invitation to a car bomb. But the security lockdown was working in Kirkuk. There were only two attacks during the voting. Early in the morning someone fired a mortar into a stadium full of Kurdish returnees. A 16-year-old boy named Yusef Nejem died. No matter how much they patrol or enforce curfews, the U.S. forces can't so far stop the mortars, rockets or roadside bombs. Another mortar wounded three in an Arab neighborhood late in the afternoon.

The Kurds weren't the only ones sending not-so-subtle suggestions to voters. The streets in Turkoman areas were covered in graffiti, including blue Turkish crescents and the number of the Turkoman party on the ballot. The mood in those parts of town wasn't so jubilant, but there was still voting. Other places were downright tense. Some of my BBC colleagues had been filming in a market early this week when a few Arabs urgently whispered to them that it wasn't safe. Kirkuk is still a border town between the chaos in the south and the relative peace in the north.

Arabs in Kirkuk didn't appear to be voting in the same enthusiastic numbers as other ethnic groups. The main Sunni parties boycotted the polls, and there were American attack helicopters zooming around the city, which may explain any hesitance to go vote. With a Kurdish driver and translator, it was risky, but we stopped for what was supposed to be a quick visit at a middle school in Hy Nassir, a solidly Arab quarter.

The visit got long all of a sudden. Despite the letter-size Election Commission sticker on our windshield, the Arab police around the station greeted us at about 40 yards with a few shots in the air. My colleague Ayub Nuri, a Kurdish journalist with perfect Arabic, shouted and pointed to the sticker and we slowly approached. The cops fired off about a dozen rounds with their AK-47s -- and it wasn't clear just how high over our heads they were aiming.

We turned the car around, amid shouts of "Journalist!" out the window in Arabic and a mishmash of Kurdish and English orders and expletives inside the car. Many Iraqi police wear ski masks for their own protection, and the sight of four of them running toward our car with their guns leveled was reminiscent of Fallujah. Suddenly, we were jumping out of the car with our hands up.

After a few moments, our disbelief turned into fear, and then ridicule, as the men giggled and apologized to us. You should have had a bigger sticker on your car, they told us, as if we could have asked for one from the American major who had given out credentials.

But we'd been made, and badly. The neighborhood knew we were there, and suddenly everyone down the block looked a little mean. (Kirkuk is about as far south as you can go before the total red zone of the Sunni triangle. Insurgents can move in Sunni areas with ease.) The guys on the corner cheered up with a little conversation, but they said they couldn't promise our safety beyond that block. The police showed us around the polling station and bragged about a good turnout among Arab voters. Then they advised us to wait for a patrol car to escort us out of the area. We waited an hour for the cruiser they called, and then gave up and just made a bolt for the highway, without incident.

Turkoman neighborhoods also reported a high turnout, though the suspicion of a fix being involved never quite vanished. At the day's end, the polling station at Al Tisayn, a middle school, was close to empty, but the administrators said they'd had more than 2,000 voters during the day. The staff represented a good slice of Kirkuk: a Kurd, a Turkoman, a Christian and an Arab. "You see the whole Iraqi family here," said Omar Muhamad, a Kurdish engineer working at the center. Nearby a Turkoman newspaperman, also on staff, agreed. "Yesterday everyone was afraid; today we all feel very strong." But then he went on, "Still, we have heard that in Shorja, the Kurds are not allowing Turcomans to vote."

"Excuse me -- but did you see this? Speak of what you saw," said Muhamad, the Kurdish engineer, who hadn't walked so far away.

"No, please, I am speaking. He is not letting me speak," said the Turkoman, who wouldn't give his name.

"There was no problem, but some mistakes. And some groups want to make trouble," he continued. "This is the first time we've tried this in Iraq. Maybe next time it will be normal."

He was right about the groups wanting to make trouble in Kirkuk. After a quiet Election Day, intense gunfire, mortars and American jets were heard late into the night.

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