By AP
Nashville, TN – Organizers expect more than 6,000 Iraqi expatriates to converge on Nashville this week to vote on candidates for their nation's new democratic government.
Voters will select a 275 member parliament to serve for a full four year term and name the first fully constitutional government in Iraq since the collapse of Saddam Hussein's rule in 2003.
Tennessee is one of only five states in the country where voting is taking place, the only one in the southeast.
Voting will take place Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week with the polls open from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. each day. Voting will take place near the Nashville airport in an industrial warehouse area.
Nashville is home to the nation's largest community of expatriate Kurds, estimated to number about 8,000. Kurdish people were an oppressed minority under the regime of former iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.