Insurgents strike in wave of violence

INSURGENTS killed a police captain at a checkpoint and gunned down an Iraqi National Guard officer in a billiard hall in scattered violence against American forces and their allies in northern Iraq yesterday.

Police Captain Bassam Ali Ahmed died of wounds a day after being shot on Thursday as he manned a checkpoint in Samarra. Iraqi and US forces mounted a major offensive against Sunni Muslim rebels in the city two months ago, but there have been frequent attacks since then.

Further to the north, in the restive oil refining town of Baiji, Ziyad Tareq, an off-duty member of the Iraqi National Guard, was shot dead by men who burst into a billiard hall armed with automatic rifles, police and hospital staff said.

Iraq’s new, US-trained security forces are prime targets for insurgents opposed to the occupation.

Two civilians, a man and a woman, were injured near the predominantly Sunni town of Baquba when a roadside bomb detonated as a convoy of National Guard vehicles passed by. No Guards were injured, eyewitnesses said.

A similar bomb also struck a US military convoy north of the city but caused little damage.

US and Iraqi officials fear an upsurge in violence as the country prepares for an election on January 30, which is likely to consolidate power for the Shi’ite majority at the expense of the long-dominant Sunnis.

An explosion caused a large fire near Baquba on an oil pipeline that runs from Khanaqin, on the Iranian border, to Baghdad’s Dora refinery.

At Baiji, an official of Iraq’s North Oil Company said the Salaheddin refinery had shut down because it had reached its storage capacity and pipeline sabotage was stopping it transporting its products further afield.

Baghdad and other cities are in the grip of grave shortages of petrol and heating oil as well as gas for cooking. It is partly a result of sabotage to pipelines but mainly due to attacks on convoys that import much of Iraq’s energy. Meantime, two US soldiers were killed and four injured in a helicopter accident at an air base in Mosul.

The crash occurred when an AH-64 Apache helicopter hit a UH-60 Black Hawk that was on the ground, a US military spokesman said. The accident is under investigation.