By Steven Lee Myers and Marc Santora
Even before the votes were tallied, Iraq's candidates and coalitions began positioning themselves in an evolving political landscape on Monday. Some claimed victory, and a few conceded defeat in an election on Sunday that the top American officials here called a milestone that kept the withdrawal of American troops on pace.
Iraq's election commission announced that 62 percent of Iraqis voted, though only 53 percent cast ballots in Baghdad, which was struck by a wave of violence as polls opened.
While lower than the 76 percent that turned out in the country's last parliamentary election in December 2005, the national turnout was higher than last year's showing in provincial elections, suggesting higher stakes. Some of the largest turnout occurred in regions, like Kirkuk and Nineveh, which include disputed territories.
"It was really a good day for Iraqi democracy," the American ambassador to Iraq, Christopher R. Hill, told reporters. "And I believe it will be a foundation point, a new beginning for the U.S. relationship with Iraq that we hope will stretch for decades to come."
With even preliminary results not expected for another day or longer, Iraq's political leaders, like American officials, sought to portray the election according to their own political objectives.
"I think we'll be neck and neck with Maliki," said Maysoon al-Damluji, a candidate and spokeswoman for the coalition led by a former interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, referring to the incumbent prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. "I think we'll beat him by a couple of seats or he might beat us by a couple of seats."
The two men emerged from Sunday's votes as the seeming front-runners to be prime minister, after campaigning as secular, nonsectarian leaders promising to unite all Iraqis. While that message appeared to have resonated with voters, neither man's coalition won enough to control a majority of seats in a new 325-member Council of Representatives.
For the Americans, even the uncertainty of the outcome and the likelihood of protracted negotiations over forming a coalition did not diminish the optimism of what they described as a "very quiet and very orderly" election, as Mr. Hill put it.
General Odierno challenged the characterization in some news reports that Sunday's election was significantly marred by violence, particularly in Baghdad. He said only three polling stations, in the northern province of Nineveh - out of nearly 50,000 across the country - closed, and those for only 15 minutes.
While he acknowledged that there had been blasts around Baghdad, which reverberated through the capital for more three hours before tapering off, he attributed most of them to explosives rigged in water bottles, which he said caused significant noise but little damage.
The general said that the American military had recorded not a single mortar or rocket attack in Baghdad. His statement was at odds with those by Iraqi officials, as well as a senior Pentagon official in Washington and even one of his own battalion commanders, who on Sunday night reported eight rocket or mortar attacks in his area in northeast Baghdad.
General Odierno also would not confirm a death toll from Sunday's violence, which Iraqi security and hospital officials and witnesses said killed at least 38 in Baghdad and wounded dozens more. He said that Iraqi commanders had told him that two apartment buildings destroyed Sunday by bombs set off within them were abandoned and unoccupied.
They were not. In the rubble of one of the buildings, in the Ur neighborhood of northeast Baghdad, the familiar human toll of the country's violence overshadowed the celebration of Iraqi democracy heard elsewhere.
"There are probably still bodies buried here," said Emad Aziz, 45, as rescue workers ended a second day of searching through the collapsed building. Mr. Aziz said he lived there for four years with his wife and children. He was in a welding shop across the street when the blast occurred. His wife and two daughters, ages 5 and 7, died. So did his stepsister. In all, 22 people died in the building, according to officials and neighbors.
"What can I say?" he asked with resignation. "I have lost my family."
The second apartment complex, a few blocks away in the same neighborhood, was destroyed only minutes after the first.
Ahmed Sagheer, that building's owner as well as a resident, said he had heard the whizzing sound of a rocket before an explosion devastated the structure as he was walking to a polling station to vote. A police officer on Sunday also attributed the damage to a rocket. A group of neighbors, however, said that the damage was caused by explosives stored or put there by a stranger who had rented a shop on the building's ground floor.
A third building, in the Huriya neighborhood of Baghdad, was badly damaged by an explosion whose cause was uncertain. At least seven people were killed, including a woman and her two young sons.
In the fog of Iraq's conflict, accounts often conflict. The motives of attacks are debated, the significance disputed. Only the tragedy of loss is unambiguous.
Outside one of the buildings in Ur, grieving mourners have already strung up a black banner honoring one of the families killed: "The people here went to God the Most Merciful on March 7, 2010."
Many Iraqi voters said they had gone to the polls in defiance of the attacks, so that, while still deadly, the violence was unable to disrupt the political process.
Already some candidates were conceding defeat, a part of the democratic process that is still a novelty here. In Anbar, one of the leading tribal figures, Sheik Ahmed Abu Risha, acknowledged that the coalition he had joined was behind that led by Mr. Allawi, a secular Shiite who appears to have rallied significant Sunni support.
Mr. Allawi's coalition, Iraqiya, "got what it lusted for," he said, pledging to work with his bloc "for Iraq and its unity."
Qassim Daoud, a Shiite lawmaker, said he learned Monday from his coalition's observers that he had failed to win a seat in Najaf.
Mr. Daoud ran as a candidate on the Iraqi National Alliance, a coalition that challenged Mr. Maliki's bloc for primacy among the country's Shiite majority and appeared to have fallen behind, according to Iraqi political officials.
"We have to face the reality that this is the opinion of the public," he said. "The society made their choice, and we have to respect that decision."
