Voters went to the polls in south Lebanon yesterday where Syria's staunchest allies Hizbollah and Amal were set to triumph in the first general elections since Syrian troops left the country.

Many in the Shia Muslim heartland see a vote for Hizbollah as a vote for retaining the group's arms as resistance against neighbouring Israel which occupied the south for 22 years.

"I am going to vote for Hizbollah because they liberated the south," said Zeinab Yasin, adjusting a veil concealing her hair. "We owe them our blood," she said in the border town of Houla, among the first to be abandoned by Israeli troops in 2000.

Staunchly anti-Israel Hizbollah, which Washington labels a terrorist group, and the more moderate Amal are the dominant forces among the Shias, Lebanon's largest sect.

Voting got off to a slow start as the Amal-Hizbollah alliance, dubbed the "steamroller," had already won six of the 23 seats in the south by default, due to a lack of challengers.

But Interior Minister Hassan al-Sabaa said turnout among the 675,000 eligible voters in the south was "good."

Damascus backed both Amal and Hizbollah during and after the 19751990 civil war, and Shias largely stayed away from anti-Syrian street protests that swept Beirut after the Feb. 14 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri.