BAGHDAD, 4 November 2004 — Iraqis traumatized by violence barely heeded the US election yesterday as a suicide bomber attacked a US checkpoint near Baghdad airport and kidnappers seized five more foreigners, including an American.

After President George Bush clinched victory over Democratic challenger John Kerry, one Iraqi in a Baghdad restaurant said it was time Washington altered course in Iraq.

“We hope the American president will change his policy toward Iraq ... because Iraq is oppressed and can’t remain occupied,” Salem Shummari told Reuters Television.

During vote-counting earlier, many Iraqis kept their television sets tuned to Ramadan religious programs. “Will Kerry turn occupation into liberation? No. Has Bush kept his promises? No. Whoever wins we will be at their mercy,” said Raad Fadel, selling musical instruments in Baghdad.

Bush’s deadliest enemy Osama Bin Laden said the US president had dragged America into a quagmire in Iraq and warned for the first time of retaliation for Iraqi deaths.

“Bush’s hands are sullied with the blood of those on both sides just for oil and to employ his private companies,” the Al-Qaeda leader said in a full Internet broadcast of a video aired in part by Arabic Al Jazeera television last week. “Remember that for every action, there is a reaction.”

Hungary and the Netherlands said they would withdraw their troops from a US-led multinational force in Iraq by March. Bulgaria said it will cut its military presence by 10 percent.

Before Kerry conceded defeat, US Marines watched election coverage at their base near Fallujah, west of Baghdad.

Attacks and kidnappings have intensified as Marines step up pressure on Fallujah and Ramadi before an expected offensive to retake rebel cities to enable elections to go ahead in January.

US planes raided Fallujah yesterday, sending plumes of black smoke rising from the eastern edge of the city, witnesses said.

Seven explosions shook Fallujah, about 50 km west of Baghdad, they said. A woman was seriously wounded and a teenage girl lost her right leg in the strikes, hospital official Issam Mohammed said.

A roadside bomb killed a US soldier and wounded another at Salman Pak, just south of Baghdad, the military said.

A suspected suicide bomber blew up his vehicle on the main road to Baghdad airport, killing an Iraqi security man and wounding seven civilians, witnesses and hospital staff said. Reuters photographs showed soldiers loading a corpse in a black bag into a military ambulance. A US spokesman at the airport later said it was the body of an Iraqi security man.

An Interior Ministry spokesman said river patrol police had found three unidentified bodies under a bridge across the Tigris on Tuesday. He said they were mutilated but could not confirm an earlier report that they had been decapitated.

Al Jazeera said militants had beheaded three Iraqi National Guards that a previously unknown group accused of spying for US troops in Iraq and helping arrest insurgents.

The channel aired footage showing three men with a masked man behind them, but did not broadcast the beheadings.

A US Embassy spokesman said he had no word on the three bodies, or on a US-Lebanese contractor named Radim Sadiq who was seized in Baghdad’s western suburb of Mansour on Tuesday. He also had no information on an American national abducted along with Filipino accountant Roberto Tarongoy, 31, and a Nepali from their Saudi company’s office in Mansour on Monday.

Four Jordanian truck drivers were kidnapped in western Iraq on Tuesday, a Foreign Ministry official in Amman said.

Another militant group said it beheaded an Iraqi officer in the northern city of Mosul and posted a video of the killing on its Web site. The Army of Ansar Al-Sunna accused Maj. Hussein Shunun of helping US forces against insurgents.

The Care International charity that employs British-Iraqi captive Margaret Hassan said it was distressed by the latest video issued by her kidnappers and urged them to free her.

The tape showed Hassan — seized by unidentified kidnappers in Baghdad on Oct. 19 — fainting on camera with water thrown at her to revive her. Hassan’s captors threatened in the tape on Tuesday to turn her over to a group led by Al-Qaeda ally Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi within 48 hours unless British troops quit Iraq, Al Jazeera said.

“We are not going to make a public response,” a British Embassy spokeswoman said of the latest video.

Gunmen killed an Oil Ministry official, Hussein Ali, as he left his home in Baghdad.