JEDDAH/BRUSSELS, 7 November 2004 — Iraq is determined to “flush out” the insurgents and their foreign allies from their last remaining hideouts well ahead of next January’s elections, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said in an interview conducted in Brussels. He called on “all those interested in the rule of law” to help his government crush the insurgents and hold elections in 12 weeks’ time.
“We cannot allow pockets of our national territory to remain outside Iraqi authority,” he said. “We consider those pockets as chunks of Iraq that remain to be liberated.”
Allawi spoke as violence escalated in the so-called Sunni triangle with insurgents staging attacks in Samarra, Baghdad, and Ramadi.
The deadliest assaults were in Samarra, where a suicide car bomber rammed into a police station and three car bombs exploded elsewhere in the city. Insurgents also attacked three other police stations.
Police said the onslaught killed 34 people, including 19 Iraqi police, two Iraqi National Guards, two members of an Iraqi Rapid Reaction Force and 11 civilians. They said 43 people had been wounded, 28 of them members of the security forces.
US and Iraqi forces stormed Samarra a month ago to dislodge rebels. The latest attacks showed that Samarra is far from pacified.
A Marine spokesman said an attack on a US convoy wounded 20 Marines in Ramadi, 110 km west of Baghdad. A police source said it had been a car bomb blast.
Hospital staff said at least one Iraqi was killed and 14 wounded in clashes between rebels and US forces in the city.
In the capital Baghdad, a powerful explosion struck the main airport road, killing an Iraqi civilian and wounding another and three US soldiers, the US military said.
In his interview, Allawi said he did not underestimate the difficulties of re-taking Fallujah, the rebel town west of Baghdad that is targeted by a major assault by American and Iraqi troops.
“The terrorists in Fallujah have lots of arms, including heavy weapons,” Allawi said.
“They are well-entrenched and determined. But they shall be crushed.”
The prime minister said the insurgents had stolen large quantities of weapons from Iraq’s army arsenals in the post-liberation confusion. But they had also received or purchased arms from a number of foreign countries and on the black market. The arms the insurgents have include surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles.
Allawi said his governments had spared no effort to find a negotiated end to the crisis in Fallujah.
He said the negotiations started last September when Fallujah citizens wrote to him asking for help to throw out foreign terrorists and their Iraqi allies.
The talks collapsed when it became clear that the insurgents and the terrorists were, in effect, holding the remaining population of Fallujah hostage. “ What the people want us to do is liberate them from their captors,” he said.
He denied claims that the operation in Fallujah had been decided by the US with an eye on President George W Bush’s re-election bid. “Fallujah may be related to an election,” Allawi said, “but the relation is to Iraq’s coming election, not to America’s election that has already taken place. We want the people of Fallujah to be able to vote along with everyone else in Iraq.”
The interim prime minister said he had rejected a demand by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to consider postponing the assault on Fallujah. “The same people who talk like that would criticize us if we held the elections with Fallujah and a few other places left out,” he said.
