Baghdad, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraq's most senior Shi'ite Muslim cleric urged followers to take up arms against a full-blown Sunni militant insurgency to topple Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a conflict that threatens civil war and a possible break-up of the country.

In Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama said he was reviewing military options, short of sending combat troops, to help Iraq fight the insurgency but warned any U.S. action must be accompanied by an Iraqi effort to bridge political divisions. (Full Story)

In a rare intervention at Friday prayers in the holy city of Kerbala, a message from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is the highest religious authority for Shi'ites in Iraq, said people should unite to fight back against a lightning advance by militants from the radical Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Fighters under the black flag of ISIL are sweeping south towards the capital Baghdad in a campaign to recreate a mediaeval caliphate carved out of fragmenting Iraq and Syria that has turned into a widespread rebellion against Maliki.

"People who are capable of carrying arms and fighting the terrorists in defense of their country ... should volunteer to join the security forces to achieve this sacred goal," said Sheikh Abdulmehdi al-Karbalai, delivering Sistani's message.

Those killed fighting ISIL militants would be martyrs, he said as the faithful chanted in acknowledgement.

Amidst the spreading chaos, Iraqi Kurdish forces seized control of Kirkuk, an oil hub just outside their autonomous enclave that they have long seen as their historical capital, three days after ISIL fighters captured the major city of Mosul.

There are concerns that sectarian and tribal conflict might dismember Iraq into Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish entities. The atmosphere in Baghdad was tense on Friday, the streets were empty, residents were stock-piling food and arming themselves.

Reflecting fears that ISIL's insurgency could erupt into a civil war and disrupt oil exports from a major OPEC member state, the price of Brent crude oil edged further above $113 a barrel on Friday, up about $4 since the start of the week.

MALIKI MUST ACT

Militants Claim More Territory in IraqPlay Video

Obama told reporters at the White House he would not send U.S. troops back into combat in Iraq but had asked his national security team to prepare "a range of other options" to help Iraqi security forces confront fighters from ISIL. He made clear he expected steps toward Iraqi political reconciliation.

"The United States is not simply going involve itself in a military action in the absence of a political plan by the Iraqis that gives us some assurance that they are prepared to work together," he said.

The U.S. president was facing a chorus of criticism from Republican opponents who say that his missteps in responding to the Syrian civil war and dithering on Iraq has left the United States with few options.

"We need to be hitting these columns of terrorists marching on Baghdad with drones now," said Representative Ed Royce, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Influential Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham also called for air strikes to deal the insurgents "a crippling blow."

American officials have watched in dismay as the U.S.-trained and -armed Iraqi security forces have crumbled and fled in the face of an onslaught by the militants. Obama noted the United States had invested a lot of money and training in the Iraqi security forces.

"The fact that they are not willing to stand and fight and defend their posts ... indicates that there's a problem with morale, there's a problem in terms of commitment," Obama said. "Ultimately, that's rooted in the political problems that have plagued the country for a very long time."

Western officials have long complained that Maliki has done little to heal sectarian rifts that have left many of Iraq's minority Sunnis, cut out of power since Saddam Hussein's demise, aggrieved and vengeful - a mood exploited by ISIL.

A U.S. counterterrorism official questioned whether ISIL had the capacity to turn "tactical victories in Iraq into strategic gains," noting that with just a few thousand fighters it was relying on Sunni nationalist groups that might not back it in the long run.

"There are still plenty of things that could go wrong for a group that typically has done well on its home Sunni turf but, if Syria is any guide, is hardly invincible when confronted in unfriendly territory by capable and motivated fighters," the official said.

International outcry over Iraq crisisPlay Video

The ISIL advance has been joined by former Baathist officers who were loyal to Saddam as well as disaffected armed groups and tribes who want to oust Maliki. Cities and towns that have fallen to the militants so far have been mainly Sunni and the gains have largely been uncontested.

It had long been known that Mosul, a city of two million people, harbored not just ISIL but also the Baathist militant group the Naqshbandi Army, believed to be headed by Ezzat Ibrahim al Douri, a former close aide to Saddam.

After the fall of Saddam to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, officers from the old Iraqi army who had not been reconciled to the new order collected in the Mosu l area. The city's proximity to the border with Syria allowed Baathists - Saddam's political party - and Islamic radicals freedom of movement.

U.S. AND IRAN INTERESTS COINCIDE

On the advance, a member of the Mujahideen Army, consisting of ex-military officers and more moderate Islamists, said: "We were contacted by ISIL around three days before the attack on Mosul asking us to join them. Speaking honestly we were reluctant to join as we were not satisfied they could do the job and defeat thousands of government troops in Mosul.

"When ISIL entered Mosul and swept out government forces positions in hours ... Only then did we decide to join forces and fight with them as long as we had a sole objective to kick Maliki forces out of Mosul and remove injustice."

The pace of events means that now, an alarmed Shi'ite Islamic Republic of Iran, which in the 1980s fought Saddam for eight years at a time when the Sunni Iraqi leader enjoyed quiet U.S. support, may be willing to cooperate with the "Great Satan" Washington to bolster mutual ally Maliki.

The idea is being discussed internally among the Tehran leadership, a senior Iranian official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We can work with Americans to end the insurgency in the Middle East," the official said, referring to the sudden escalation of conflict in Iraq. (Full Story)

The U.S. State Department said Washington was not discussing Iraq with Tehran.

America's role in IraqPlay Video

Thrusting further to the southeast after their seizure of Mosul in the far north and Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, ISIL entered two towns in Diyala province bordering Iran.

Saadiyah and Jalawla had fallen to the Sunni Muslim insurgents after government troops fled their positions.

Iraqi army units subsequently subjected Saadiyah and Jalawla to artillery fire from the nearby town of Muqdadiya. ISIL fighters eventually withdrew from Jalawla and well-organized Kurdish Peshmerga fighters took over. Iraqi army helicopters fired rockets at one of the largest mosques in Tikrit on Friday, according to witnesses. There were no further details available.

"CHANCE TO REPENT"

Giving a hint of their vision of a caliphate, ISIL published sharia rules for the realm they have carved out in northern Iraq, including a ban on drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and an edict on women to wear only all-covering, shapeless clothing.

ISIL militants were reported to have executed soldiers and policemen after their seizure of some towns.

On Friday, ISIL said it was giving soldiers and policemen a "chance to repent ... For those asking who we are, we are the soldiers of Islam and have shouldered the responsibility to restore the glory of the Islamic Caliphate”.

Residents near the border with Syria, where ISIL has exploited civil war to seize wide tracts of that country's east, watched militants bulldozing tracks through frontier sand berms.

ISIL has battled rival rebel factions in Syria for months and occasionally taken on President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

ISIL's Syria branch is now bringing in weapons seized in Iraq from retreating government forces, according to Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group. But its fighters appear to have held back in Syria, especially in their eastern stronghold near the Iraqi border, while their Iraqi wing was making rapid military gains.

At Baiji, near Kirkuk, ISIL fighters ringed Iraq's largest refinery, underlining the incipient threat to the oil industry.

Further south, militant forces extended their advance to towns about an hour's drive from Baghdad, where Shi'ite militia were mobilizing for what could be a replay of the ethnic and sectarian bloodbath of 2006 and 2007. Trucks carrying Shi'ite volunteers in uniform rumbled to front lines to defend Baghdad.

SADR HOLDS FIRE

Despite the call to arms from Sistani, influential Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who led revolts against U.S. forces, has not called on his followers to mobilize. At Friday prayers, his faithful were told to wait for directions in the coming days on how to form “peace regiments” that will defend holy sites.

Maliki's army already lost control of much of the Euphrates valley west of the capital to ISIL last year. With the evaporation of the army in the Tigris valley to the north, the government could be left with just Baghdad and areas south - home to the Shi'ite majority in Iraq's 32 million population.

ISIL has set up military councils to run the towns they captured. “'Our final destination will be Baghdad, the decisive battle will be there' - that’s what their leader kept repeating," said a regional tribal figure.

(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes in Beirut, Ziad al-Sinjary in Mosul Isabel Coles in Arbil, Steve Holland and Mark Hosenball in Washington; Writing by Peter Millership and David Alexander; Editing by Mark Heinrich and David Storey)

BAGHDAD (AP) — Hundreds of young Iraqi men gripped by religious and nationalistic fervor streamed into volunteer centers across Baghdad Saturday, answering a call by the country's top Shiite cleric to join the fight against Sunni militants advancing in the north.

Volunteers from across Baghdad were ferried in buses to a base in the eastern part of the city for training. In Some centers, dozens of them climbed onto the back of army trucks, chanting Shiite slogans and hoisting assault rifles.

"By God's will, we will be victorious." said one volunteer, Ali Saleh Aziz. "We will not be stopped by the ISIL or any other terrorists."

The massive response to the call by the Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, which was issued via his representative on Friday, comes as sectarian tensions are threatening to push the country back toward civil war in the worst crisis since U.S. forces withdrew at the end of 2011.

Fighters from an al-Qaida splinter group, drawing support from former Saddam Hussein-era figures and other disaffected Sunnis, have made dramatic gains in the Sunni heartland north of Baghdad after overrunning Iraq's second-largest city of Mosul on Tuesday. Soldiers and policemen have melted away in the face of the lightning advance, and thousands have fled to the self-rule Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

On Saturday, insurgents seized the small town of Adeim in Diyala province after Iraqi security forces pulled out, said the head of the municipal council, Mohammed Dhifan. Adeim is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad. There was no official confirmation of the loss of the town.

Jawad al-Bolani, a lawmaker and former Cabinet minister close to al-Maliki, meanwhile, said a military offensive was underway Saturday to drive the insurgents from Tikrit, Saddam's hometown north of Baghdad, although fighting in the area could not be confirmed.

The fast-moving rebellion has emerged as the biggest threat to Iraq's stability since even before the Americans left.

Long-simmering Sunni-Shiite tensions boiled over after the U.S.-led invasion ousted Saddam in 2003, leading to vicious fighting between the two Muslim sects. But the bloodshed ebbed in 2008 after a so-called U.S. surge, a revolt by moderate Sunnis against al-Qaida in Iraq and a Shiite militia cease-fire.

The latest bout of fighting, stoked by the civil war in neighboring Syria, has pushed the nation even closer to a precipice that could partition it into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish zones.

Shiite cleric and political leader Ammar al-Hakim was shown on television networks donning a camouflaged military fatigue as he spoke to volunteers from his party, although he still wore his clerical black turban that designates him as a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.

State-run television also aired a constant flow of nationalist songs, clips of soldiers marching or singing, flying aircraft, brief interviews with troops vowing to crush the militants and archival clips of the nation's top Shiite clerics.

Extensive clips of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's visit on Friday to the city of Samarra, home to a much revered Shiite shrine that was bombed in 2006, also were broadcast.

The footage seemed clearly aimed at rehabilitating his reputation in the eyes of Shiites, with a dour-faced al-Maliki seen praying at the Shiite shrine — an apparent reminder of his commitment to his faith and the protection of its followers. He also declared that Samarra would be the assembly point for the march farther north to drive out the militants, another decision with a religious slant to win over Shiites.

In an address to military commanders in Samarra, he warned that army deserters could face the death penalty if they don't report back to their units. But he insisted the crisis had a silver lining.

"This is our chance to clean and purge the army from these elements that only want to make gains from being in the army and the police," he said. "They thought that this is the beginning of the end but, in fact, we say that this is the beginning of their end and defeat," he said.

Also Saturday, the Iraqi government's counterterrorism department, said the son of Saddam's vice president, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was killed in an air raid by the Iraqi air force in Tikrit. It said Ahmed al-Douri was killed with some 50 other Saddam loyalists and ISIL fighters on Friday. The report could not be immediately verified.

They were responding to a call by Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric for Iraqis to defend their country against the Sunni Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which in a lightning advance.

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Associated Press writer Qassim Abdul-Zahra contributed to this report from Baghdad.

Iraqis flock to volunteer to fight insurgents

The response to a Shiite cleric’s call to fight Islamic militants has been encouraging so far.
Threat grows more urgent

Misguided US invasion spawned crisis in Iraq: analysts

Washington (AFP) - The rise of Al-Qaeda-linked militants in Iraq can be traced to America's invasion of the country more than a decade ago, as it left a power vacuum and unleashed sectarian bloodletting, experts said Friday.

With television footage of Sunni extremists sweeping across Iraq this week, critics of former president George W. Bush's decision to invade in 2003 said the onslaught offered yet more proof of the war's disastrous fallout.

Neoconservatives who backed Bush's decision touted the war as a way to build a model for democracy in the Middle East. Instead, it has fueled an explosive Sunni-Shiite divide that is still sending shockwaves through the region, experts said.

For University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole, events in Iraq are "an indictment of the George W. Bush administration, which falsely said it was going into Iraq because of a connection between Al-Qaeda and Baghdad."

"There was none," said Cole, an outspoken opponent of the invasion.

But by occupying and "weakening" Iraq, the Bush administration ironically created conditions that allowed Al-Qaeda "to take and hold territory in our own time," he wrote.

Cole also blamed Iraq's troubles on the legacy of European imperial meddling from a century ago, sectarian-minded leaders in Baghdad and a US-trained Iraqi army that ran away from the militants.

The late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was long painted as an arch-enemy by the United States, but more than ten years since US-led forces toppled his regime, his era appears relatively stable and innocuous compared to the virulent threats now engulfing Iraq and causing alarm in Washington.

Saddam's fall opened the door to an emboldened Iran extending its reach across the region, a Shiite-led government that has alienated Sunnis and helped give birth to Al-Qaeda linked extremists now entrenched in Iraq and Syria, analysts said.

Other commentators blamed the Bush administration for the wholesale dismantling of Baghdad's entire government apparatus without building an alternative.

- Destroying the Iraqi state -

"When the Americans invaded in March 2003, they destroyed the Iraqi state -- its military, its bureaucracy, its police force and most everything else that might hold a country together," wrote journalist and author Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker.

"They spent the next nine years trying to build a state to replace the one they crushed."

By the time US troops departed in 2011, there had been genuine progress but the Americans "were not finished with the job," Filkins wrote.

Obama wanted the American troops to come home, while Iraqi leaders "didn't particularly want them to stay," he said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow had foreseen a fiasco from the outset.

"We warned long ago that the adventurism the Americans and the British started there would not end well," Lavrov said Thursday.

Without referring to Bush by name, Lavrov said the situation in Iraq has been "deteriorating at an exponential rate" ever since the Americans ousted Saddam.

But Republican hawks like Senator John McCain blame the current crisis on Obama.

McCain argues that a surge of US troops in 2007 helped rescue the war effort and accuses the White House of squandering those gains by pulling out American forces three years ago.

"We had it won. Thanks to the surge and thanks to general David Petraeus, we had it won," McCain told MSNBC television, referring to the former commander of US troops in Iraq.

"And then the decision was made by the Obama administration to not have a residual force in Iraq."

Obama's deputies insist the Iraqi government would not grant legal protections to US troops and so a deal to keep a smaller force there fell apart.

"There's plenty of room for finger-pointing for the debacle in Iraq. Let's not forget the disastrous decision to start the war in 2003 as the place to begin finger-pointing," Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former CIA officer, told AFP.

For both supporters and opponents of the war, the virtual collapse of the Iraqi army on the battlefield in the face of fighters inspired by Al-Qaeda has come as a sobering jolt.

"The trouble is, as the events of this week show, what the Americans left behind was an Iraqi state that was not able to stand on its own," wrote Filkins.

"What we built is now coming apart. This is the real legacy of America's war in Iraq."

JERUSALEM (AP) — A terror group abducted three teens, including an American, who disappeared in the West Bank, Israel's prime minister said Saturday, as soldiers searched the territory to find them.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again blamed the Palestinian Authority for the Thursday night disappearance of the teens. Palestinian officials say they are assisting Israeli forces, who pored over surveillance footage Saturday and arrested more than a dozen Palestinians.

There have been at least three claims of responsibility for the abduction, though none could be immediately verified.

Netanyahu made a televised address Saturday night after meeting with top security officials, saying Israeli forces were conducting "intensive operations" to locate the teens and bring them home.

"Our children were kidnapped by a terror group," he said. "There is no doubt about that."

Netanyahu said he directed Israel's security branches to use all means at their disposal to find the abducted teenagers and "prevent the possibility of their transfer to the Gaza Strip or anywhere else."

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Israeli soldiers arrest a Palestinian man in the West Bank City of Hebron, Saturday, June 14, 2014. …

The Israeli military identified the teens as Naftali Frenkel, 16, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19. Israeli television station Channel 10 named Frenkel as the U.S. citizen that officials earlier mentioned. They were reportedly hitchhiking home when they were abducted.

Their kidnapping would be the biggest abduction of its kind by Palestinian militant groups in recent memory in the West Bank. Israeli-Palestinian tensions already were strained in part because of the recent formation of a Palestinian unity government that has the backing of the Islamic militant group Hamas.

Hamas, branded a terror group by the West for its attacks aimed at civilians, has been involved in kidnappings of Israelis in the past. The group routinely claims responsibility if involved in an attack, but has not claimed it took the teens.

Hamas ruled Gaza for seven years, after violently taking over the territory from the Palestinian Fatah group in 2007, and remains the de facto power there despite the unity deal.

Netanyahu said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas must do everything necessary to help return the teens. He said Abbas is responsible for any attack on Israel whether it emanates from the West Bank or Gaza.

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Israeli soldiers arrest a Palestinian man in the West Bank City of Hebron, Saturday, June 14, 2014. …

"It's impossible to talk peace with Israel while simultaneously form a unity government with Hamas, a terror group committed to destroying Israel," he said.

However, Palestinian officials have rejected Netanyahu's contention that the Palestinian Authority, a self-rule government that administers 38 percent of the West Bank, was responsible for the fate of the teens. They noted that the three went missing in an area of the West Bank that is under full Israeli control.

Three different claims of responsibility for the kidnapping have emerged in the West Bank, though it's not clear if any were authentic.

In one leaflet, a group portraying itself as a branch of an al-Qaida splinter group said it kidnapped the three to avenge the killing of three members in a clash with Israeli security forces in the Hebron area earlier this year. Another statement purportedly came from the Al Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad.

Palestinians have been involved in other kidnappings in the West Bank. Last year, a Palestinian brought an Israeli soldier to a village in the West Bank and killed him in hopes of trading the body for his jailed brother. In 2001, a Palestinian woman lured an Israeli teenage boy over the Internet to the West Bank where he was killed by waiting gunmen.

The woman was released in 2011 along with over a thousand others for Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit, who had been held captive in Gaza by Hamas-allied militants for more than five years.

Israel PM: Teens taken by terror group

Benjamin Netanyahu says there is "no doubt" who is behind the kidnapping of three teenagers, one of them a U.S. citizen.
Search continues

Afghans brave Taliban threats to choose new leader

By AMIR SHAH and RAHIM FAIEZ3 hours ago

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghans braved threats of violence and searing heat Saturday to vote in a presidential runoff that likely will mark the country's first peaceful transfer of authority, an important step toward democracy as foreign combat troops leave. The new leader will be challenged with trying to improve ties with the West and combatting corruption while facing a powerful Taliban insurgency and declining international aid.

Abdullah Abdullah, who emerged as the front-runner with 45 percent of the vote in the first round, faced Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, an ex-World Bank official and finance minister. Neither garnered the majority needed to win outright, but previous candidates and their supporters have since offered endorsements to each, making the final outcome unpredictable.

The two men differ more in personality than policy. Both promise to sign a long-delayed security pact with the United States, which President Hamid Karzai has rebuffed. That would allow nearly 10,000 American troops to remain in the country for two more years to conduct counterterrorism operations and continue training and advising the ill-prepared Afghan army and police. And both pledge to fight for peace and against corruption.

But their different ethnic backgrounds have highlighted the tribal fault lines in this country of 30 million ravaged by decades of war.

"I voted today for my future, because it is still not clear — the country is at war and corruption is everywhere and security is terrible. I want the next president to bring security above all and jobs," said Marya Nazami, who voted for Ahmadzai.

The White House praised Afghan voters for their "courage and resolve" in the second round.

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An Independent Election Commission (IEC) employee shows a ballot to observers at a polling station i …

"These elections are a significant step forward on Afghanistan's democratic path," it said in a statement. "We look forward to working with the next government chosen by the Afghan people."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry praised Afghans for "laying the groundwork for the first democratic transition" in their country's history.

"These brave Afghans from all walks of life again defied the threat of violence and went to the ballot box and voted because they want to set the course for a more inclusive, prosperous, and stable future," Kerry said in a statement. He said it is essential that the process of tallying the votes, adjudicating completes and finalizing the results "be transparent and accountable."

Observer groups said the balloting was relatively smooth, although both candidates and observers said they had evidence of fraud ranging from ballot box stuffing to proxy voting. Several polling stations also opened late or failed to open at all because of security concerns, and many voters complained of ballot shortages.

The Taliban intensified attacks ahead of voting and warned people to stay away from the polls, but the Islamic militants failed to disrupt the first round. They stepped up attacks again ahead of this round, including an assassination attempt that narrowly missed Abdullah just over a week ago.

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Afghanistan's presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah, right, poses for photos before he casts …

Despite a series of rocket barrages and other scattered attacks that Interior Minister Mohammad Umar Daudzai said killed 47 people, including 20 civilians and an election commission worker, the voting was largely peaceful. Daudzai also said 60 militants were killed.

Independent Election Commission Chairman Ahmad Yousuf Nouristani, speaking at a joint press conference after polls closed, said initial estimates show that more than 7 million Afghans voted, which would be equivalent to the first round on April 5. That would be a turnout of about 60 percent of Afghanistan's 12 million eligible voters.

Official preliminary results were to be announced on July 2, with final results released on July 22. Nouristani said his commission would release partial results in the coming weeks.

Many voters said they were eager to get the bilateral security agreement with the United States signed after seeing Islamic extremists seize large sections of Iraq in recent days, nearly three years after U.S. troops withdrew from that country. Iraq's Shiite-led government had discussed the possibility of a residual U.S. force but the two sides were unable to reach an agreement.

"Iraq is burning," said shopkeeper Abbas Razaye after voting in a mosque in western Kabul. "We need the foreign troops for the time being. Otherwise our history of civil war will repeat itself and Afghanistan will deteriorate even more than Iraq."

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In this image released by the Presidential Palace, Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks after castin …

Abdullah, 53, whose mother was a Tajik, draws his support mainly from that ethnic group although his father was Pashtun. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, he served as adviser to and spokesman for Tajik warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated by al-Qaida two days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Later that year, Abdullah became the face of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban movement after the U.S. toppled the Taliban government, giving frequent news conferences to international journalists. He served as foreign minister and then was the runner-up in Karzai's disputed re-election in 2009.

His supporters praise him for staying in the country during the civil war and fighting the Taliban, as opposed to Ahmadzai who lived in exile and at one point even had U.S. citizenship, which he gave up for his own failed bid against Karzai five years ago.

"Abdullah was always among the Afghans inside Afghanistan," said restaurant owner Mohammad Nahim, who cast his ballot in western Kabul. "Abdullah can bring peace and improve the economy."

Ahmadzai, a 64-year-old, U.S.-educated Pashtun, has gained the support of the country's largest ethnic group, particularly in the Taliban heartland in southern Afghanistan.

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An Afghan woman inks her finger during the presidential election at a polling station in Jalalabad, …

"According to our will, Ashraf Ghani is the best candidate and the rightful leader of our country," said Abdul Saboor Zamaria, who works for a non-governmental organization in the southern city of Kandahar. "If Abdullah Abdullah is made our leader, more mistrust and rage will spread in our country and violence will keep increasing day by day."

Ahmadzai called on electoral officials to take the complaints seriously and investigate them.

"We will patiently wait for the final results of the election. Figures are on the way," he said at a news conference. "But the nation has proved that it wants a change, and we are the team for change."

Abdullah expressed concern about the independence of the electoral commissions, which were appointed by Karzai, and called on them to act fairly, saying the legitimacy of the future government depends on it.

"We are in a good position. I can say we are in a very good position, and it's up to the two commissions to make the announcement."

Karzai, who has led the country since the U.S. invasion and was constitutionally barred from seeking a third term, cast his ballot at a high school near the presidential palace. Many analysts say his decision to step down peacefully will be one of the major successes of his otherwise troubled legacy.

"Today your vote will lead Afghanistan toward a better future, better government and a better life," he said to his countrymen. "Afghanistan is taking another step forward in a transition toward security, progress and stability."

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Associated Press writers Mirwais Khan in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Kim Gamel in Cairo contributed to this report.

Despite the Taliban's threat of violence, nearly 60 percent of eligible voters turned out to elect a new president.

50 people killed