The ballot box beats the coffin

The brave voters of Iraq defied the terrorists — and proved the doom-mongers wrong.

AS IRAQIS voted in their first truly free election, they may have noticed a slogan on some walls in Baghdad and parts of the Sunni Triangle: Min al-sanduq il-al-sanduq. Its literal translation is “from the box into the box”. But the message is starker: “From the ballot box to the coffin.”

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of the jihadists in Iraq, issued a statement before polling day threatening: “We shall kill anyone associated with elections: candidates, monitors, and voters.” The tone of those who opposed yesterday’s election was set by Yussuf al-Ayyeri, the al-Qaeda theoretician, who in a book published in 2003 described Iraq as “the principal battleground between Islam and the forces of Unbelief”.

“It is not the American war machine that should be of the utmost concern to Muslims. What threatens the future of Islam, in fact its survival, is American democracy,” al-Ayyeri wrote. Last month Osama bin Laden called on jihadists to disrupt Iraq’s elections on the ground that only Allah has the power to legislate.