Iraq: US troops launch raids to curb pre-election violence

US troops have staged a series of raids in northern and central Iraq, arresting dozens, as insurgents stepped up their attacks two weeks ahead of national elections, ambushing a car carrying a female candidate and killing 24 people in other assaults.

US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted US and Iraqi forces cannot stop “extraordinary” intimidation by insurgents before the January 30 election.

US and Iraqi officials have insisted that the elections go ahead as scheduled, despite the persistent violence.

Interim President Ghazi al-Yawer said that if the elections were postponed for six months, there was no guarantee the violence would wane. The insurgents “might lay down for two or three months, then carry out attacks again,” he said.

Most of the violence occurred around Kut, south east of Baghdad, and the northern city of Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city.

Near Kut, three Iraqi policemen were killed in one shooting and three Iraqi National Guard officers were killed by a hand grenade in another attack. As mourners gathered for the policemen’s funeral, a suicide attacker blew himself up in the crowd, killing himself and seven others.

Gunmen also shot dead an Iraqi translator for a Filipino company working on water projects for multi-national forces near Kut, a medical official said.

In Mosul, insurgents shot dead a member of a local government council. They also set off explosives as a US convoy passed, damaging a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, but no casualties were immediately reported.

A mortar also damaged a school in Mosul to be used as a polling place. And four other mortar rounds blasted schools in relatively quiet Basra, in the south, also slated to serve as polling centres.

Earlier today, insurgents opened fire at a checkpoint in central Iraq, killing seven Iraqi National Guard soldiers, officials said. The deaths occurred at a checkpoint in Buhriz, about 35 miles north east of Baghdad, near the troubled city of Baquoba.

Even in heavily Shiite areas of south-central Iraq, which is far more stable than Mosul or Baghdad, several election workers have bee threatened and resigned in recent days, a senior US Embassy official said yesterday in Hillah while outlining election preparations there.

“Most expect a high turnout if things seem quiet enough. There is some worry if you have a series of car bombs, people will think twice about coming,” the official said.

Elsewhere in central Baghdad, insurgents attacked an Iraqi National Guard patrol on the east side of the Tigris river, then melted into the crowd in the open market area, sending shoppers running.

Sounds of heavy machine-gun fire reverberated for nearly an hour along Haifa street on the western side of the river.

Wolfowitz, speaking in Jakarta, Indonesia, acknowledged that the security threat 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”.

“There was intimidation in Afghanistan – the Taliban threatened all kinds of violence against people who registered or people who voted,” he said. “But I don’t believe they ever got around to shooting election workers in the street or kidnapping the children of political candidates.”