The city of Sulaimaniyah where Hassan is casting his vote in Iraq's general election has long been a bastion of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the former rebel faction of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

But Goran, whose name means Change in Kurdish, is challenging its long grip on power with a list of candidates made up largely of PUK defectors.

The 42-year-old mechanic's reticence about revealing who he is voting for is fuelled by a series of clashes between Goran supporters and those of the PUK in the run-up to polling day on Sunday.

As recently as Friday, five people were wounded in a gunfight between supporters of the two parties.

"They (the PUK) have done nothing for me," said Hassan, a qualified mechanic who has struggled to find work in his chosen field since he graduated in 1991.

"Our money has been misused by the main parties," he says quietly as he queues outside the classroom-turned-polling station in the east of the city to cast his ballot.

"Most of my friends want to vote for Goran also -- 98 percent of them want more transparency and openness here."

Goran is hoping to take the majority of Sulaimaniyah province's 17 seats in the Iraqi parliament and push the PUK into an embarrassing third place among Kurdish parties.

The other main former rebel faction -- the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of regional president Massud Barzani, which has its strongholds in Arbil and Dohuk provinces further north -- is widely expected to win the most seats of any Kurdish party.

There have been no credible opinion polls in the region, however, so it remains impossible to predict how each party will fare.

Dana Abdul Qader, a 27-year-old metal worker, explicitly says he fears reprisals if he admits to local journalists that he has voted for Goran.

"If the journalist told the authorities, maybe they would cut my father's pension," he says quietly, standing outside a polling station in the low-income Kalawa district of Sulaimaniyah.

"The PUK don't do anything for us, only for themselves."

PUK supporters are highly visible and have no qualms about declaring their allegiance to a party which fought successive Baghdad governments for more than four decades and played a key role in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime.

"We were victims of the previous regime -- our village was attacked," says, Sardar Ahmed Hassan, 35.

"I had to vote for the PUK," he adds, as he recounts how he found refuge in Sulaimaniyah after fleeing ethnically-mixed Nineveh province to the northwest.

Shadan Omer Mohammed, a 36-year-old housewife, says she voted for the PUK as she had seen a great deal of reconstruction in her neighbourhood of the city.

"There has been lots of change -- they have been successful and defended Kurdish rights," she adds, dressed in bright green traditional Kurdish clothes, a common sight on polling day in the region.

Goran confounded expectations by winning 23.57 percent of the vote in elections to the autonomous Kurdish region's parliament in July standing on an anti-corruption platform. Sunday was the first time it had contested an Iraq-wide election.

The party's breakthrough last year means that for the first time Kurdish voters have a realistic alternative to the long dominant alliance of the PUK and KDP, which were again standing on a joint ticket in Sunday's election.

"Life has been the same the past four years, I'm voting for a better alternative for the Kurds," says Arham Saeed, 25.

Pressed further, the labourer replies: "I am voting for Goran."