Kurdish and Christian politicians charged that thousands were unable to vote in Nineveh province because of a lack of ballot papers, sparking riots in one town north of Mosul.

As night fell when polling sites closed 10 hours after they opened, US troops transported both ballot boxes and election workers to a US military base for the laborious count.

With the exception of isolated incidents, Mosul did not suffer the violence US commanders had feared in the predominantly Sunni Muslim city of about 1.5 million.

An Iraqi soldier accidentally killed a civilian, a voter was wounded by sniper fire as he left a polling station and four mortar explosions caused no casualties, said the military.