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Attack on Iraq Election Office Kills Two
SAMARRA, Iraq (Reuters) - Two people were killed and eight wounded on Saturday, in a mortar attack on an election office north of Baghdad, police and hospital sources said.
They said five mortars landed on the premises in Dujail, one of many around the country providing information to potential voters ahead of the Jan. 30 election. It will be used as a polling station on the day of the vote in six weeks.
Among the wounded were six Iraqi National Guards, who were guarding the office against attack in the Sunni Muslim town, some 50 km (30 miles) north of the capital.
Insurgents bent on undermining the U.S.-backed government often attack Iraq's fledgling security forces.
U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned rebels, determined to expel foreign forces from Iraq, could step up attacks ahead of what officials hope will be Iraq's first free election in decades.
A powerful Sunni group, the Muslim Clerics Association, has called on Iraqis to boycott the poll in protest against U.S. offensives on Falluja and other cities in Iraq's Sunni north and west where the insurgency is strongest.
Iraqi police also found two bodies dumped in the Sunni city of Baiji, 180 km (110 miles) north of the capital.
One of the men had been shot in the head and the other killed by hanging, police said. Both had their arms tied behind their backs.
They have not been identified and the motives for the murders, which have become increasingly common in Iraq over the course of the year, were not known.
At Dakkuk, near the northern oil center of Kirkuk, one National Guard was killed and three wounded when gunmen fired on their checkpoint early on Saturday.
In Mosul, Iraq's third city, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, a civilian was killed and eight wounded when a bus was caught in the crossfire after a roadside bomb struck a U.S. patrol, witnesses and hospital officials said. (Additional reporting by Maher al-Thanoon in Mosul and Aref Mohammed in Kirkuk)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7130270
Among the wounded were six Iraqi National Guards, who were guarding the office against attack in the Sunni Muslim town, some 50 km (30 miles) north of the capital.
Insurgents bent on undermining the U.S.-backed government often attack Iraq's fledgling security forces.
U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned rebels, determined to expel foreign forces from Iraq, could step up attacks ahead of what officials hope will be Iraq's first free election in decades.
A powerful Sunni group, the Muslim Clerics Association, has called on Iraqis to boycott the poll in protest against U.S. offensives on Falluja and other cities in Iraq's Sunni north and west where the insurgency is strongest.
Iraqi police also found two bodies dumped in the Sunni city of Baiji, 180 km (110 miles) north of the capital.
One of the men had been shot in the head and the other killed by hanging, police said. Both had their arms tied behind their backs.
They have not been identified and the motives for the murders, which have become increasingly common in Iraq over the course of the year, were not known.
At Dakkuk, near the northern oil center of Kirkuk, one National Guard was killed and three wounded when gunmen fired on their checkpoint early on Saturday.
In Mosul, Iraq's third city, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, a civilian was killed and eight wounded when a bus was caught in the crossfire after a roadside bomb struck a U.S. patrol, witnesses and hospital officials said. (Additional reporting by Maher al-Thanoon in Mosul and Aref Mohammed in Kirkuk)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7130270
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Saturday, December 18, 2004
Violence in Iraq showed no sign of abating Friday as four Turkish Embassy guards were killed in an armed attack on a road in Mosul and the country braced itself for more attacks ahead of January's historic elections.
"According to information obtained by our embassy in Baghdad, there have been casualties in the incident ... We are very upset that some personnel were killed," a Turkish Foreign Ministry statement said.
It did not specify how many guards died, but CNN Turk television put the number at four.
One of the guards and a driver survived the attack and returned to Turkey, while two other guards made it safely to the embassy in Baghdad, the ministry said.
"Our authorities are investigating the matter and trying to obtain more information from the Iraqi interim government and local officials," it added.
Meanwhile, some 2,000 Communists gathered in a Baghdad sports hall Friday for the first rally of Iraq's election campaign.
Once one of the strongest in the Arab world, the Iraqi Communist party has always prided itself on being virtually the only faction to overcome the country's communal divisions and recruit senior cadres from the long oppressed Shiite and Kurdish communities, as well as the Sunni Arab elite.
The Communists' historic slogan, "a free country and a happy people," echoed around the stands of the stadium Friday.
In the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, four people were hauled from their car by masked men and killed, witnesses said, adding that one of them may have been a non-Iraqi.
"After taking them out of the vehicle, the attackers shot three men dead and decapitated the fourth," who spoke a foreign language, said Abdallah Zibeidi.
As night fell, four bodies lay in the road, while masked men in a nearby car forbade anyone from approaching.
Three people were killed in a missile attack on a Kirkuk camp for Kurdish returnees in what appeared to be a deliberate attempt to stoke communal tensions in Iraq's northern
oil capital ahead of next month's elections.
A U.S. marine was also killed in action during operations Thursday in the restive Al-Anbar Province west of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.
Near the capital, two attacks on Iraqi oil pipelines occurred after Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden ordered his fighters to strike at oil facilities in Iraq and the Gulf, in a new audiotape message Thursday.
Armed men clashed with national guards close to an oil pipeline 35 kilometers south of the capital, followed by an explosion at the pipeline, the national guard said.
A statement circulated in Baiji, 200 kilometers north of Baghdad, said the Al-Qaeda linked group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraq's most wanted man, had blown up a
pipeline, following orders from "supreme commander Osama bin Laden."
An oil company employee confirmed that a pipeline outside Baiji had been sabotaged on Friday morning.
And despite a government announcement that Fallujah residents would be allowed back into their battle-scarred city next week, U.S. officers in the former rebel bastion said ongoing fighting between U.S. marines and insurgents made it unlikely.
A marine officer based outside the city, requesting anonymity, said that a civilian return "seems highly unlikely, if you consider that we are
still fighting the rebels at this very moment."
Almost all of the city's 250,000 to 300,000 residents fled the city, 50 kilometers west of Baghdad, before and after the start of a massive U.S.-led assault on Fallujah on Nov. 8.
The top U.S. commander in Iraq said a group of former senior Iraqi Baathists, including Saddam's fugitive number two Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, was directing and financing rebels in Iraq out of Syria.
"We have fairly good information that there are senior former Baathists, members of what they call the 'New Regional Command,' operating out of Syria with impunity, and providing direction and financing to the insurgency in Iraq," General George Casey said. "That needs to stop," he added.
A Syrian foreign ministry official, quoted by the state news agency SANA, rejected the charges. "The repetition of these invented accusations, by certain people, show the will to hide the real reasons behind the deterioration of the situation in Iraq," he said.
http://dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=11126
In a continuing attempt to disrupt Iraq's foreign trade, guerrillas killed four Turkish embassy guards (apparently actually Turkish policemen) in cold blood.
Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, which had to close its Baghdad offices because of threats, still manages to gather news in Iraq. It is reporting that the leading clerics in the Shiite holy city of Najaf issued a communique condemning Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan for attacking the United Iraqi Alliance list as a cat's paw of Iran. The ayatollahs said that they did not see how Shaalan could continue as minister of defense given his irresponsible statements.
Iran's Ayatollah Jannati, a hardliner, called on the Shiites of Iraq to turn out to vote in large numbers if they wanted to guarantee their future in Iraq. Talk like that is what Shaalan uses to scare other Iraqis about the Iraqi Shiites. It isn't fair, since Iraqi Shiites are Arabs and guard their independence of Tehran.
It also reports that the Communist Party is the first to have had a big election rally in Baghdad, with 2000 persons attending (the party was virtually destroyed by Saddam Hussein but had once been a substantial force in Iraqi politics).
http://www.juancole.com/2004/12/voter-registration-stations-attacked.html