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Violence unabated as Iraqi vote nears
By wire services
Published January 28, 2005
BAGHDAD - Car bombings and other insurgent attacks continued Thursday across central Iraq as election officials made final preparations for Sunday's nationwide ballot and independent monitors prepared to risk their lives assessing its conduct.
At least a dozen people were killed, including a U.S. Marine. The violence came as tens of thousands of Iraqi security officers and about 150,000 American troops launched an extensive effort to safeguard polling stations from a promised insurgent onslaught.
As part of an intensifying campaign of intimidation, an al-Qaida affiliate led by Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi posted a videotape on the Internet showing the murder of a candidate from the party of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.
The tape included a warning to Allawi personally: "You traitor, wait for the angel of death."
Another extremist group that has taken responsibility for many of the worst attacks in Iraq, the Ansar al-Sunna Army, posted a threat on an Internet message board: "We hereby repeat our warning to everyone that the (polling centers) are going to be targeted by the mujahedeen. And let the nominees know that, even if they are not elected, they are not safe from the hands of the mujahedeen."
As night fell in Baghdad, Iraqi police erected checkpoints and patrolled in force on the eve of a three-day "election holiday," as authorities of the U.S.-backed interim government have called the curfews and other restrictions on movement in effect across much of the country starting today.
Iraqi newspapers also published for the first time the names of some 7,000 National Assembly candidates, many of whose identities had been kept secret to protect them from assassination.
The interim government will deploy an additional 2,500 troops to help guard the elections, the Defense Ministry said. A total of 300,000 Iraqi and multinational troops will provide security, with Iraq's U.S.-trained forces taking the lead role.
About 9,000 Iraqi troops also are being dispatched to guard oil pipelines, which insurgents have repeatedly targeted.
Attacks were reported Thursday in at least seven provinces, including relatively peaceful Basra in the south, where militants fired mortar shells at four schools designated as polling stations.
One Marine was killed and five others were wounded when insurgents fired mortars at their base near Iskandariyah, about 30 miles south of Baghdad in tense Babil province.
Three Iraqis were killed and seven injured when a roadside bomb missed a U.S. convoy in Mahmudiyah, a religiously mixed area of Babil province, hospital officials said.
Most of the attacks occurred in Salaheddin province in an area of the Sunni triangle north and west of Baghdad that U.S. and Iraqi officials have identified as one of the key trouble spots. Three Iraqi civilians were killed Thursday when a car bomb exploded in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad. Hours later, mortar shells fell on a designated polling station in Samarra, police said. Armed men in Samarra blew up a school administration building after ordering the staff to leave, police Lt. Qassim Mohammed said. The destroyed building had been scheduled to be a voting center Sunday.
Kennedy: Start pullout now
WASHINGTON - Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., called on President Bush on Thursday to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq after Sunday's elections and complete the pullout by early next year, declaring the president's Iraq policy "a catastrophic failure."
Saying the American military's continued presence in Iraq is fanning the flames of conflict, Kennedy said at least 12,000 U.S. troops should leave at once, and a complete withdrawal should be finished as early as possible in 2006.
TV anchors in Iraq
NEW YORK - American television networks have all sent their top anchors to Iraq this week to cover Sunday's elections, using them as a news hook to update viewers about what's going on in the war zone.
NBC's Brian Williams, ABC's Peter Jennings and CBS' Dan Rather have been anchoring their evening news broadcasts from Iraq. Fox News Channel's Shepard Smith and CNN's Anderson Cooper are doing the same for their cablecasts.
Information from the Associated Press and Washington Post was used in this report.
[Last modified January 28, 2005, 05:56:11]
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