Oh dear SunnyJoe - Allah alone knows where you were looking to find your 0.06% !!!
I believe that the population of Iraq is 23 million - I'll post my source if you like - but it's a widely agreed figure.
Have a look at the 2nd last paragraph from the following article published by the London times (online)......Skip over the murder of 18 Shia youths just looking for a job, and the 3 Jordanians who had one, and the other 2 murders as well....and you'll see that there are nearly 14 million Iraqis registered to vote. So do you think that that's a little over 50% of all Iraqis? If I looked I could've found an age demographic and subtracted those Iraquis (based on age) who were inelligible to vote and then done the percentage calculation, but I think I've made my point
cheers Lekki
January 07, 2005
Labourers murdered heading for army base From James Hider in Baghdad
THE bodies of 18 murdered Shia labourers from Baghdad, some of them as young as 14, were found yesterday in a field close to the northern city of Mosul, where the youths had headed in search of work on a US army base. The discovery of the boys and young men, their hands bound behind their backs and a bullet in the back of the head of each of them, came as Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister, prolonged the state of emergency in Iraq for another 30 days to counter the growing insurgency in the build-up to elections on January 30.
“The men, all from the northern Qaddumiya district of Baghdad, were promised lucrative jobs at US bases in Mosul and taken there on December 8,” an Interior Ministry official said. On the way, insurgents stopped their two minibuses and shot them dead.
Guerrillas have frequently given warning that any Iraqi working with the US-led coalition or the Government will be killed.
That warning was reiterated in a note found on the bodies of three Jordanian lorry drivers discovered yesterday in Ramadi, deep in the Sunni Triangle.
The men had been shot dead, the handwritten note saying: “This is the fate of anyone who co-operates with the Americans.”
As insurgents stepped up their violent campaign before the elections, seven US soldiers were killed last night when their Bradley fighting vehicle hit a roadside bomb in western Baghdad.
A US Marine was also killed in Anbar province west of the capital, making it the deadliest day for the US military in Iraq since a suicide bombing at a mess tent in Mosul on December 21 killed 22 people.
In a separate incident in Baghdad, a leader of the Iraqi Communist Party, which is running in the elections in January, was found strangled. He had been blindfolded and his hands were tied with wire.
The Iraqi Government and its Anglo-American backers have insisted that the elections will go ahead despite the rising tide of violence. Lieutenant-General Thomas Metz, the senior commander of American ground troops in Iraq, said that delaying the polls would only hand a victory to the rebels.
“We refuse to be intimidated by the thugs intent on advancing their selfish, oppressive intent through terror, destruction, intimidation and murder,” he said. “Brutal intimidation is the only tool left in their arsenal.”
He said that he could not guarantee the safety of the almost 14 million registered voters during the elections, but the Iraqi authorities and coalition forces are launching an unprecedented security campaign to reassure the population as they head off to about 9,000 polling centres.
The Prime Minister said that the state of emergency declared in November would go on through the elections, with curfews and tighter travel restrictions. As part of the measures, all movement between Iraq’s 18 governorates will be strictly limited, checkpoints will be placed on all roads and the mobile phone network will be shut down during the voting period.
