The excitement is building among ex-patriate Iraqis living in the United States in anticipation of the upcoming election in Iraq:
Abdul Albisherawy says he doesn’t care who wins the upcoming Iraqi elections as long as his homeland isn’t run by a dictator.
“Any leader that gets in, that’s fine as long as the people run the country,” the Chicago cab driver said Monday as he prepared to join thousands of Iraqi expatriates registering to vote in the upcoming Iraqi election.
As the seven-day voter registration period opened Monday in the Chicago area and four other U.S. cities, Albisherawy and others talked with excitement about the opportunity to cast ballots in Iraq’s first independent election in nearly 50 years.
Chicago is one of five cities in the United States which will have polling places for the upcoming election along with Detroit, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC.
I live (nearly) within walking distance of a large Assyrian church with a very active community consisting mostly of Iraqis. I may swing by there to see what’s going on. It’s estimated that there are more than 30,000 Iraqi ex-patriates qualified to vote in the Chicago area and more than 80,000 in Detroit for something like 250,000 nationwide. This population is largely Christian and, since most fled Iraq to avoid the persecution of Christian Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, very anti-Saddam.
