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Iraq

As some Iraqis resume life, insurgents resume mayhem

BAGHDAD - Once again, the highway to Baghdad airport was a scene of mayhem: a mangled vehicle hit by a suicide blast, a helicopter ferrying away casualties. With the airport freshly reopened after landmark elections, insurgents were back in action Thursday on one of Iraq's deadliest roads.

The suicide car bombing against a convoy on the highway was one of a string of attacks across the country that killed about 30 people - including two Marines - and signaled that guerrillas were uncowed by the election.

A lull in violence since Sunday's vote brought out a cautious sense of security among Baghdad residents. Throughout the day, outdoor markets were full, and children played in parks. Even Thursday's attacks, which took place outside Baghdad or far from its center, did not disrupt the mood: In the evening, wedding processions of cars festooned with plastic flowers blared their horns in celebration in many parts of the city.

"People feel safer after the elections. ... There are more people out on the streets today," said Jassim Rashq, a barber whose brother - a Shiite cleric - was gunned down last year with his son and a bodyguard.

But no one is expecting an end to the violence, and some fear it may only increase if resentment over the election grows among the Sunni Arab minority, which makes up the backbone of the insurgency.

Many Sunnis are believed to have sat out the vote, either for fear of retaliation or because of calls for a boycott by their clerics. And new admissions Thursday by election officials that many voters in the northern region of Mosul were unable to vote will likely only fuel Sunni alienation.

The election commission released its first partial returns Thursday, based on 1.6-million votes counted and certified so far, showing a lead for candidates backed by the United Iraqi Alliance, a mainly Shiite coalition endorsed by the country's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

The partial counts showed the alliance with 1.1-million votes and 360,500 votes for the second-place ticket, that of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

The returns were too small to indicate a national trend and were hardly a surprise, since they reflected partial counts from five mainly Shiite provinces - Dhi Qar, Muthanna, Karbala, Najaf and Qadisiyah - and from Baghdad, where 25 percent of the vote was certified.

Election officials have said full official results and turnout might not be ready until Tuesday.

On Thursday, the electoral commission said it had sent a team to Mosul to investigate complaints that some stations never opened or ran out of ballots in Nineveh province, which has a large Sunni Arab population.

The postelection lull in attacks had prompted Allawi to declare that the vote's success dealt a major blow to the insurgency. "The final outcome (for insurgents) will be failure. They will continue for months but this will end," he told Iraqi television.

But the string of new attacks that began Wednesday night showed the tactics that insurgents have been using for months.

In the highway attack, a bomber detonated his car near a foreign convoy escorted by military Humvees, destroying several vehicles and damaging a house, Iraqi police said. Witnesses reported helicopters evacuating casualties, but there was no confirmation of dead or wounded.

In the deadliest incident, insurgents stopped a minibus south of Kirkuk, ordered army recruits off the vehicle and gunned down 12 of them, said Maj. Gen. Anwar Mohammed Amin. Two soldiers were allowed to go free, ordered by the rebels to warn others against joining Iraq's U.S.-backed security forces, he said.

An ambush in western Baghdad killed six Iraqi security personnel. Shootings in Baghdad, a mortar attack in the northern city of Tal Afar and an assault on a police station in the southern city of Samawah killed five Iraqis.

Two Marines were killed in action Wednesday night in Anbar, a Sunni insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad.

Gunmen fired on a vehicle carrying Iraqi contractors Thursday to jobs at a U.S. military base in Baqubah north of the capital, killing two people, officials said.

Also, the bodies of two men in blood-soaked clothes were found in the western insurgent stronghold of Ramadi. A handwritten note tucked into the shirt of one of the men claimed the two were Iraqi national guardsmen.

[Last modified February 4, 2005, 00:19:15]