Sulaimaniyah, a centre of support for ailing Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, erupted in celebration today over a video apparently showing him casting his vote for upcoming polls.
The video of Talabani shows him seated, then later cuts to a ballot being placed in a box before returning to show the president raising a finger stained with ink used to identify those who have voted, to applause of people standing around him.
The authenticity of the video, which was broadcast on a Kurdish TV channel, could not be independently confirmed, and the date it was shot was unclear, though out-of-country voting for Iraqi parliamentary polls began yesterday and continued throughout today.
Car horns blared, people shouted and waved flags of Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party while hanging out of car windows, and some fired off celebratory gunshots in Sulaimaniyah, located in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region.
One man shot a pistol through the open sunroof of his SUV, while a taxi driver held a Kalashnikov assault rifle out the window, firing as he drove past a PUK office where a crowd of revellers had gathered, according to an AFP journalist.
Some security personnel appeared to have confiscated one man's Kalashnikov, hustling him away.
But another security forces member fired a pistol out the window of a truck, and a young man walked down one main street carrying a Kalashnikov with no one moving to stop him.
Bumper-to-bumper traffic stretched out of sight on both sides of the street, with many of the cars flying green PUK flags, some bearing Talabani's image.
