IRAQ: The last time 82-year-old Ms Malia Ahmed stepped out of her house high in the mountains dividing Iraq from Iran, her home town of Biyara was controlled by an Islamist militia with links to al-Qaeda.
That was more than two years ago. Yesterday, too frail to walk, she was carried by her grandson Mr Ali Nasreddin to the local polling station to vote.
"She suddenly made the decision," said Mr Nasreddin. "Every vote counted, she told me."
Too tired to speak, Ms Ahmed limited herself to waving a finger soaked in indelible purple ink. Then, offering his excuses, her grandson hauled her up to start the 20-minute walk home.
Election day throughout the Kurdish north was full of similar small acts of determination. In Kirkuk, according to one local election monitor, queues had begun to form outside polling stations by five o'clock, three hours before voting started.
"We told them to go home for their own safety, but they turned up again an hour later," he says.
On the road between Suleimaniya and Halabja, at 6.30 a.m., a group of women were already convinced they'd missed their chance to vote.
"People registered in Arbat have already been picked up," wailed one. "But there's no sign of the bus supposed to take us to Seyyid Sadiq." At that moment, the bus appeared. The group leapt in, without the customary polite farewells.
The mood of high seriousness was no less evident in the long, orderly queues outside polling stations everywhere. "They would have done the English proud," jokes Rosina Ynzenga, one of only two independent international observers working in the north.
Small wonder that by lunchtime most polling stations were already winding down. In Halabja, polling station head Mr La'ik Abdulrahim said over 1,500 people out of 2,200 registered had cast their vote by midday. In Biyara and Seyyid Sadiq, they were even more efficient.
"We have had more than 90 per cent turnout," said Mr Hama Raza, observer in Biyara for one of Iraqi Kurdistan's two largest political parties.
These are figures to be expected in a region insistent that the broad autonomy it has built up after 1991 is maintained. But the almost total lack of violence throughout the north also helped.
Observers declared themselves no less satisfied with the running of elections. There were minor disturbances. One polling station had booths in full view of the staff. Staff in Biyara told of one illiterate voter taken advantage of by a friend with a political agenda.
But the commonest complaint seemed simply to be that ballot boxes were barely large enough to hold all the votes.
"It's been a remarkable success, as far as I can see," said Rosina Ynzenga's colleague, Mr Thomas von der Osten-Sacken. "The real pity is that there are not more international observers here to see that. They could have ensured the new Iraqi government has the international legitimacy it desperately needs."