US forces struggle to cope with security threat ahead of Iraq vote

US FORCES carried out a series of raids in Iraq’s troubled northern city of Mosul yesterday, as American and Iraqi authorities scrambled to prepare for elections in the face of mass resignations of polling staff and police.

US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged the security threat to the January 30 election was worse than in last October’s nationwide balloting in Afghanistan and that it was impossible to guarantee “absolute security” against the “extraordinary intimidation that the enemy is undertaking.”

In the Mosul area, the US Army’s Stryker Brigade Combat Team detained 11 suspected insurgents, including an alleged cell leader, and seized weapons and bomb-making material in several weekend raids - part of the military’s strategy to try to secure the city short of launching an all-out offensive.

East of Mosul, a Katyusha rocket slammed into a home near the Kurdish regional parliament building in Irbil where leaders of the two main Kurdish parties were meeting to discuss the election, a police official said yesterday.

The Mosul area has emerged as a major flashpoint between US and Iraqi forces and the insurgents, raising fears that the election cannot be held in much of the city, Iraq’s third largest.

US and Iraqi officials are scrambling to recruit new police and election workers in Mosul after thousands of them resigned in the face of rebel intimidation.

A new police chief was appointed a week ago to command a force of barely 1,000 police. Last November, the city had 5,000 police.

Similar mass resignations are believed to have occurred in other Sunni Muslim areas of northern, central and western Iraq.

“I would underscore that there was intimidation in Afghanistan - the Taliban threatened all kinds of violence against people who registered or people who voted,” Mr Wolfowitz said in Jakarta, Indonesia.

“But I don’t believe they ever got around to shooting election workers in the street or kidnapping the children of political candidates.”

Also yesterday, insurgents attacked an Iraqi National Guard patrol south of Baghdad, injuring two guardsmen, one of them critically, police said.

West of the capital, in the city of Ramadi, five explosions rocked a joint US-Iraqi National Guard base, sending columns of smoke rising above the area, witnesses said. Sporadic clashes were reported in the city centre.