Women in black abayas whispered prayers at the sound of a nearby explosion as they waited to vote at one Baghdad polling station. But the mood elsewhere was triumphant, with long lines in many places in the city: civilians and policemen danced with joy outside one site, and some streets were packed with voters walking shoulder-to-shoulder toward polling centers.

    Rumors of impending violence were rife. When an unexplained boom sounded near one Baghdad voting station, some women put their hands to their mouths and whispered prayers. Others continued walking calmly to the voting stations. Several shouted in unison: "We have no fear."

    "Am I scared? Of course I'm not scared. This is my country," said 50-year-old Fathiya Mohammed, wearing a head-to-toe abaya cloak.

At one polling place in Baghdad, soldiers and voters joined hands in a dance, and in Baqouba, voters jumped and clapped to celebrate the historic day. At another, an Iraqi policeman in a black ski mask tucked his assault rifle under one arm and took the hand of an elderly blind woman, guiding her to the polls.

Iraqi authorities have told us there have now been seven suicide bombings [actually 10 total, with over 40 dead and scores more wounded] carried out by men with explosives strapped around their bodies. There has also been a mortar attack in Sadr City in Baghdad which killed four voters.

So militants are doing what they can to carry out their threats to disrupt the poll and shed the blood of voters, but it is also very evident there is a lot of enthusiasm for the vote.

I spoke to the first man to cast his ballot. He emerged with his finger covered in purple indelible ink to prove that he has voted and he came out saying he was 55 years old, that he'd never done anything as important in his life as voting today, casting his ballot.

Ayman Khalas, a student, said that even as the police scraped up the bomber’s remains, the queue re-formed and voting resumed. “Nothing was going to stop us,” he said.

In the dirt-poor town of Sumawa, right on Iraq's southern border, a baby was born in a polling station to an expectant mother determined that nothing would stop her from casting a ballot.

Baghdad's mayor was overcome with emotion by the turnout of voters at City Hall, where he said thousands were celebrating."I cannot describe what I am seeing. It is incredible. This is a vote for the future, for the children, for the rule of law, for humanity, for love," Alaa al-Tamimi told Reuters.

A voter named Saad said he wasn't afraid of insurgents seeing the ink on his index finger. "We are defeating the terrorists as we are coming here," he said, proudly displaying his ink-stained finger.

Two other reinforcing developments emerged. "One was reports from our guys [UN election workers] that when there was any sort of armed incident in line, the people would scatter but when the security people had stabilized the situation, they, instead of going home, would return to the line," she said. The second was evidence that in at least two suicide bombing attacks, people ended up spitting on the bodies of the perpetrators. "In the Middle East, that is a very, very strong act of repudiation, and when I heard about that, I said, 'This is transforming into a trend.' "

All through the day, the bombs kept going off, the explosions audible inside the polling places themselves. Most of the time, the Iraqis did not even bother to look up, so inured were they to violence and so immersed in their democratic moment.

"Do you hear that, do you hear the bombs?" said Hassan Jawad, a 33-year-old election worker at Lebanon High School, speaking over the thud of an exploding shell. "We don't care. Do you understand? We don't care." "We all have to die," Mr. Jawad said. "To die for this, well, at least I will be dying for something." And then Mr. Jawad got back to work, guiding an Iraqi woman's hand to the ballot box.

"I did not sleep all night long," said Yalchin Mohammad Omar, a Turkmen voter in this ethically divided city, about 150 miles north of Baghdad. "I was frightened, but at dawn, I and my wife made a decision to go to the polls. We did our prayers, and then headed for the ballot center despite the threats, and the chaos overtaking Iraq. . . .

    Americans and those of us in free societies would do well to appreciate the price of freedom and the determination of Iraqis. How does this fit in with President Bush's vision of freedom across the Middle East and the defeat of terrorism?

Syria is worried about what will happen after the elections, as Washington continues with its experiment to spread democracy in the Arab world.

Despite the violence and the Sunni boycott (the Association of Muslim Scholars, a main force behind the boycott recently backpeddled in the face of popular support), many Arabs feel that the Iraqi vote will be more democratic than anything they have ever seen themselves.

"The toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime has had a grass roots effect in the region, the status was shaken, a symbol of tyranny was removed, so a lot of people were looking around asking: 'Why can't this happen to us, why can't a free election take place in our part of the world and a fairer political system be established in our country, without a US invasion and in a peaceful manner and democratic manner?'," said Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian analyst.

Nonetheless, this historic day was downplayed by a few:

But Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., sounded a note of caution in an interview on NBC's "Meet The (De)Press(ed)."

"It is hard to say that something is legitimate when whole portions of the country can't vote and doesn't vote," Kerry said. "No one in the United States should try to overhype this election."

    In England the BBC reports:

But there was a demonstration earlier on in the day by a group who thinks the voting is anti-democratic. (emphasis mine!)

    Did they protest when Saddam Hussein won 100% of the vote?

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