source New York Times

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 15 - Ali is only 9 years old. But when he and his buddies broke away from a street soccer game to drop into a polling station in Baghdad's Adhamiya district at noon on Thursday, Ali, a chirpy, tousle-haired youngster, seemed to catch the mood of the district's Sunni Arab population as well as anybody.

"We don't want car bombs, we want security," he said. Yards away, Sunni grown-ups were casting ballots in classrooms where the boys would have been studying Arabic or arithmetic or geography - "Boring, boring!" said Ali - had the school not been drafted for use as one of 6,000 polling stations across Iraq.

On a day when the high voter turnout among Sunni Arabs was the main surprise, Ali and his posse of friends, unguarded as boys can be, acted like a chorus for the scene unfolding about them. A new willingness to distance themselves from the insurgency, an absence of hostility for Americans, a casual contempt for Saddam Hussein, a yearning for Sunnis to find a place for themselves in the post-Hussein Iraq - the boys' themes were their parents', too, only more boldly expressed.

Adhamiya, on the east bank of the Tigris River, only a 10-minute drive from the heart of Baghdad, has been so much in the insurgents' grip that American military helicopters have avoided flying overhead for most of the past 33 months. But as whole families gathered to walk neighborhood streets on the way to the polls, and with turnouts at some voting centers surpassing 60 percent barely halfway through the voting day, Sunnis -young, old and in-between, prosperous and middle-class and unemployed, merchants and tribal sheiks and schoolteachers - seemed to relish the chance to take part.

"Happy days!" said Salim Saleh, a 52-year-old government official, finding a few remembered words of schoolboy English. Switching to Arabic, he slipped into reflective mode, acclaiming the advent of democracy in Iraq, but lamenting the local inexperience with it.

"Iraqis aren't used to democracy, we have to learn it," he said, after carefully marking and folding his poster-sized ballot. And what were the crucial elements? "A government that works in the interests of Iraq and the Iraqi people, regardless of ethnicity or sect," he said. "That would be democracy."

Only months ago, the prospect of crowds of voters lining up in Adhamiya and hundreds of other Sunni neighborhoods across the country would have seemed illusionary to American officials and military commanders who have been asked to find a way toward political stability here, and toward the start, sometime in 2006, of a withdrawal of United States forces.

When Iraqis voted in January for a transitional government, and again in a constitutional referendum in October, when the Sunni boycott of the American-sponsored political process first showed signs of easing, a cannon could have been fired in many of Adhamiya's streets without risk of striking Sunni voters.

After the January voting, when more than eight million voters turned out, hopes for peace were dashed by one of the most brutal insurgent offensives of the war.

This time, the large Sunni turnout will inevitably raise fresh hopes, of a reconciliation between what has been an alienated Sunni minority and the Shiite parties that won in January and seem poised to win the largest bloc of seats again. But pragmatists were warning after Thursday's voting that the realities of power, and who will hold it once a new government is formed, could once again render the hopes short-lived.

Still, there was enough that was different in Thursday's election to suggest that something significant had changed. This time, Sunni political groups with links to the insurgency had candidates in the election. Their leaders, as well as influential Sunni clerics in the mosques of Baghdad and other cities and towns across the Sunni heartland, had urged Sunnis to vote in large numbers. Insurgent groups with links to Mr. Hussein's ruling Baath Party had agreed to hold their fire.

Adhamiya was as good a proving ground as any for the new Sunni openness to political involvement. In the 1950's, the district was a bastion of the Arab nationalism then sweeping the Middle East, and it was along Adhamiya's alleyways that the Baath party in Iraq had its first underground stirrings.

It was in Adhamiya, too, that Mr. Hussein made his last stand as American troops entered Baghdad in April 2003, standing atop a car roof outside the Abu Hanifa mosque and pledging to lead Iraqis in resisting the Americans, before disappearing from view. It was eight months before he turned up again, caught by American troops hiding in an underground bunker near Tikrit.

Mr. Hussein, now languishing in an American military prison near Baghdad's airport, would have found little comfort in Adhamiya. At his trial, he has proclaimed himself Iraq's legitimate ruler, but the voters Thursday scoffed at his delusion.

"Saddam, he's finished," said Mr. Saleh, the government employee.

"Saddam? No, no, no!" said Saad Abdul Sattar, a 51-year-old grocery store owner, with a sweep of his upturned palm.

A tribal sheik, Khamis al-Suhail, 80, said Saddam was history, but doubted that the new parliament would be much better. "Saddam was a thief, but now we'll have 275 thieves," he said.

The freewheeling opinions among the Sunnis were hard, at times, to square with the hard-line views widely expressed to reporters on previous trips to Adhamiya, and with the inflexible attitudes common there when Mr. Hussein was still in power. The difference this time appeared to be less a matter of conversion than freedom from threat - the very thing that Ali, the schoolboy, hinted at when he celebrated having a day with his friends when they did not have to worry about the gunfire or bombs that had been common in Adhamiya.

For at least as long as the insurgent pullback to allow the Sunni voting lasted, people in the district seemed freed from intimidation, and the recurrent references to this sense of freedom reflected it.

"Before, we had a dictator, and now we have this freedom, this democracy," said Emad Abdul Jabbar, 38, a teacher acting as supervisor at the Ahrar school polling site. "This time, we have a real election, not just the sham elections we had under Saddam, and we Sunnis want to participate in the political process."

A 60-year-old merchant, Abdul Kader al-Saffar, and his wife, Ammal Abdul Razzaq, 40, who voted with their three sons, agreed. "We have found candidates in this election we can trust," Mr. Saffar said, referring to the Iraqi Consensus Front, a moderate Sunni group that had several of its political workers killed during the campaign.

Another thing many Sunnis seemed to agree on was the possibility of a reconciliation between the Americans and the Sunnis, and a distancing of the Sunnis from some of the Al Qaeda-linked insurgent groups. Many were critical of American troops, saying, as Mr. Saleh did, that "they came as liberators, but stayed on as occupiers." But pressed on the question of an American troop withdrawal, most seemed cautious, favoring a gradual drawdown.

"Let's have stability, and then the Americans can go home," said Mr. Sattar, the store owner. Told that this sounded similar to President Bush's formula for a troop withdrawal, he replied: "Then Bush has said it correctly".